The Zhiwhis ZWS-A330 multiband radio with app control is now available on Amazon US for $89.77, less a current $10 coupon. I got my order in before 8AM today, and they’re promising delivery tomorrow!
I’ve already included what usually accompanies an “incoming radio” post in my Anticipated Incoming Radio article, but I can now show the official product photo, and of course I now have the price.
The most important bit of new information is the announcement that this radio will work with the W3 wireless repeater, and that this item will be sold separately. Of course, I already have a W3 and so I’ll want to test that at some point. The DSP chip is the Si4735, [Update: The W3 repeater that comes with the ZWS-802 is not the same as the W3 repeater sold for the the ZWS-A330. The duplicate model naming is extremely confusing in my opinion.]
It also appears that the external antenna works with all bands:
Value
At this point I have no information as to whether this is a good radio or not, but if it is, then the price is certainly reasonable. The XHDATA D-808 is currently priced at $91.80, less 10% current sale discount. The D-808 is a respected mid-range multi-band radio with SSB; however, it lacks app control, UHF, VHF, Weather band, CB, media card record/play and Bluetooth. The A330 lacks LW and FM RDS.
Should be fun.
The repeater units do not appear to have any specific FCC files or approval data despite seemingly being BT devices. Has anyone done a teardown to determine exactly what they do? Certainly they are not transmitting broadband RF from the entire spectrum to be demodulated by the radio. I suspect they are actually headless radio receivers that are transmitting a demodulated audio signal back to the radio. Any takers?
I presume that these repeaters are remote-controlled radios that transmit demodulated audio back to the base radio. They could not be sending RF from the radio because they enable things the radio itself is incapable of, like SSB on the LiJiANi RD-235S and Longwave on the Zhiwhis ZWS-A330.