Xiegu X6200 review

Keen to do more field operating (and overnight camping). My rig of choice has been the Elecraft KX3 with it's excellent antenna tuner and easy to read LCD display. Since using rigs with a waterfall display of the band I find it hard to going back to tuning up and down trying to find stations. 

I purchased a Xiegu X6200 from AliExpress for AU$1200. 

It has some terrific features for portable operation:

• Decent flat battery pack that clips on the back
• Wonderful sharp and bright display
• Excellent built-in antenna tuner
• USB-C socket with interfaces for CAT control and audio
• Handles to protect the knobs

The front facing speaker is small but quite effective. Surprisingly it is NOT a touch screen (although if you connect a mouse you get a mouse pointer). This means that to go through menus you must spin the outer lower left knob to move between settings and spin the inner knob to change a setting.

A waterfall with a touch screen is a wonderful thing and on a 7300 being able to tap a signal to tune there is missing here. Tuning with the knob is a little laggy and seems to have some inertia for some reason. (Unfortunately clicking on the waterfall with a mouse isn't supported).

The rig is certainly a quality build. All the controls feel excellent and the battery pack, sadly proprietary, clips on to the back. It's remarkably compact and solid feeling. The microphone has a full set of buttons including three configurable buttons for things like NR or NB. You can also direct enter frequencies. There is also a built-in microphone and PTT button so you could use it like a hand-held.

Because of my focus on digital modes, I wouldn't buy a radio without a direct USB connection and this radio does it all. I have found that it's rather sensitive to the cable being used and I've experienced the serial devices not appearing even though I was using a USB-C to USB-C cable that clearly carries data as it works with hard disks. The supplied USB-C to USB-A cable.

When plugged into a computer two serial devices appear. The second one is the CAT port (the other is a serial terminal).

Here's the settings that work with fldigi:

Here's the settings that work with FreeDV:

Rig: Xiegu X6200

Serial Port: /dev/ttyACM1

Baud Rate: 19200

Data bits, stop bits, handshake: Default

PTT Method: CAT

Mode: Data/Pkt

Split Operation: None.

Audio Input: alsa_input.usb-C-Media_Electronics_inc.USB_Audio_Device-00.mono-fallback

Audio Output: also_output.usb-C-Media_Electronics_inc._USB_Audio_Device-00.analog-stereo

The radio should switch to mode: U-DIG or L-DIG depending on band with FreeDV

I note that the audio level to WSJT-X is too high, 88dB. I needed to reduce "mic" gain in Linux sound settings.

Bugs

Xiegu has a history of software bugs in their radios. It seems some never get fixed. The most disappointing one for me is that I'm on the latest firmware 1.0.7 and I cannot get it to connect to Wifi which is a pity as there's a WFView server (Icom radio networking server) built in and it would be great to remote access the radio.

There is a discussion group at https://xiegu-x6200.groups.io/g/main/topics that looks to be a great resource.

Conclusion

I think this is quality radio for the money. I joined our club 80m net this week and got good reports from other stations. The radio puts out about 4W on the attached battery and about 9W with external power.