(Note: At times I’m probably going to be using jargon that you aren’t going to be familiar with unless you’re an amateur radio operator. I’ll try to explain terminology as a go along but if I forget let me know in the comments and I’ll explain.)
Sidenote: So what’s with this QRP and CW stuff? A lot of amateur radio operators feel that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing in the most difficult way possible. So we do weird things like literally using the Moon as a giant reflector to bounce signals off of. Seriously. EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) is a thing in amateur radio. And a lot of us enjoy doing QRP, communicating with the least amount of power possible. Most ham transceivers have outputs of 100W or more. Then we add in amplifiers that kick that up to 1,500W. Us QRP people think that’s silly. QRP is “officially” 10W or less according to the ARRL. Most of us operate at 5W or less. And as for CW, that’s an abbreviation of the term “continuous wave”, which really is just good old fashioned Morse Code that’s been around since the mid 1800s.
For you amateur radio operators out there, this is my new toy:
That’s not some kind of weird laptop up there. That is an amateur radio transceiver, the MMX Nomad from a company called MorseNexus, formerly called Preppcom. The company has been around since about 2017, I think. And I should mention there is just a wee bit of controversy going on here for a couple of reasons, but I’ll come to that in a moment.
The Nomad isn’t a new product, it came out about 2 years ago, and previous versions of this rig, which didn’t come in the fancy case and required an external keyboard, have been around since about 2017 or so. The claim to fame for all of these transceivers from Morseexus is that not only are they QRP radios, they’re CW decoders as well. The claim is that you don’t need to know morse code in order to actually use morse code if you have one of these. It decodes the CW you hear into plain English, and sends what you type in English as CW over the air.
I have to warn you that there is a bit of controversy involving this radio and its brethren. It doesn’t have anything to do with how well these things work, so I’ll wait until the end to bring that up.
Normally I wouldn’t bother reviewing a two year old product becasue you’d think there would be dozens, if not hundreds of reviews out there already. But there aren’t. At least not for the Nomad. I’ve found a few but those seemed to be more interested in following the “CW decoders = Spawn of Satan” nonsense than in actually looking at how well the radio actually worked. Me? All I care about is if it actually works as advertised.
So what is the Nomad? It’s a QRP (low power, 3 – 5 watts output) CW only, three band transceiver. It operates on 80, 40 and 20 meters.
I set it up on the kitchen table (MrsGF is extremely patient with me and my little eccentricities, which is why we’re still happily married after 44 years <grin>) I set it up with my portable Alpha Magloop antenna on a small tripod for testing. that’s the antenna I’ve been packing along when I’ve taken the Yaesu Ft-818 out on the trails with me and it works pretty well and is quite compact when broken down. However it won’t tune down to 80 meters so for testing the Nomad I’ve only been able to use 20 and 40 meters. But the nice UPS driver recently dropped off that antenna up there on the right on my front doorstep, a vertical that’s supposed to work on 80 – 10 meters so in the near future I’ll be taking a look at that and trying to get the Nomad down on 80 meters to see how that works so you might hear more about this in the future.
It comes in a 3D printed plastic case which looks impressive at first glance, but once you look at it more closely, well, look at the side of the case in that photo up there. The case has almost razor sharp edges, sand paper like texture, what feels like some of the nastiest plastics I’ve ever had the misfortune to touch, and made with a 3D printer that looks like it’s badly in need of calibration and had the wrong temperatures, extrusion rates and travel speed set up for the filament that was being used. Come on, guys. Seriously? You’re selling this radio for $569. It should look better than this. Am I nit picking? Well, yeah, I guess I am. But at this price point getting a radio in a cheap, badly made 3D printed case doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the overall quality of the product when the buyer opens the box and pulls it out.
The back of the case and the various connectors are pretty simple. There’s the on off button on the left, the antenna connector in the center. The USB-C port seems to be only for charging the battery. The battery is a rechargable lithium and it can be easily replaced by removing 4 screws if necessary. Battery life is quite good. I’ve been playing with it for many hours after fully charging it and it still shows almost full. Any standard 5V usb power brick should work to charge it. Three jacks are for audio out, audio in, and for connecting a manual CW key if you’d rather do that than use the keyboard. It works only with a standard straight key, not an iambic paddle. What looks like an RS-232 port actually isn’t. That gives you access to various control/data lines to connect external devices. I won’t go into that because I’m not really interested and didn’t try messing with it.
Warning: Do not even turn on the radio without having a dummy load or an antenna connected to the antenna port!
Seriously. Any time you have the radio turned on, whether you’re transmitting with it or not, you have to have an antenna or dummy load connected the antenna port on the back. And, of course, mine didn’t come with a dummy load. That seems to be a $10 optional accessory. I find that even more discouraging than the badly made case. This thing absolutely, positively needs to come with that dummy load packed with the radio and even already attached to the antenna port.
The screen is a full color touch screen that is crisp and clear with an excellent back light. Although far smaller than I’d like, it doesn’t really need to be bigger than this for this application. To the left of the screen are 6 status LEDs that give you information about the operational conditions of the radio.
The touch screen is reasonably responsive and works about as well as other screens of this type that I’ve dealt with in the past. Which means it’s awkward to use and occasionally slow to respond to touches. I’ve worked with screens like this with Arduino applications and this is fairly typical of the inexpensive screens I’ve sourced from companies like Elegoo.
The silver button to the right of the screen is a speaker and you’d be surprised at how many people completely ignore the “SPEAKER” label and mistake it for the on button and start stabbing at it with a finger.
Operating the radio is relatively simple and, at least at first, enormously irritating. Operational controls are split between the keyboard and the touch screen. First you need to touch the MENU button on the screen and go through a setup process.That’s simple. Just enter your call sign and then select your class of license: technician, advanced, general or extra. The radio remembers your call sign and inserts it when necessary when calling CQ or when having a conversation with someone. It also remembers your license class and will not permit you to transmit outside of the frequency range your license class is restricted to.
You select which band to use, 80, 40 or 20, by touching the area where you see the frequency (14.035 in the photo). That switches you between the three bands or the “external” option where you’d use the Nomad mostly as a decoder with an external radio.
Once you’re on the band you want to use, you use the left and right arrow keys to actually change frequency. And this is where things begin to become annoying once again, because the up and down arrows control the number of decimal places in the frequency. If you look at the display up there, you’ll see it reads 14.035ooo. The letter ‘o’ indicates that those decimal places are not used. If I were to use the left arrow key to go down in frequency, the display would change to 14.034ooo. If I were to touch the up or down arrow, the letter ‘o’ following the 4 would change to a 0 (the number zero) and now the frequency would change from 034ooo to 0341oo if I pressed the right arrow key.
Personally I hate this. I suppose I’ll get used to it in time but I would much rather have preferred a rotary encoder to turn than stabbing at arrow keys.
The greater and less than keys < and > are used to decrease or increase the volume. While SHIFt< and SHIFT > decreases or increases the sensitivity of the CW decoder.
Other functions are Shift-H which switches between “Medium” power, about 2-3 watts depending on what band you’re using, and “High” power, about 4 – 6 watts. There is no low power option.
A very useful feature is hitting Shift-T, which puts the radio into tune mode. It transmits a low power tone and measures the amount of power being reflected back to the radio to let you tune your antenna for maximum efficiency. It puts up a bar scale and I tune the magloop until the bar is as far left as possible in the green. If the bar turns red, the transmitter isn’t properly matched to the antenna and you shouldn’t try transmitting until you take care of that situation.
To actually transmit and receive you have to resort to the touch screen. There are two buttons we’re concerned with here, CQ and ANS. CQ is, as you might imagine, the option to call CQ on the frequency you’re on. It will send a CQ, automatically inserting your call sign in the right places, until you press CALL again and it will wrap up the current transmission ending with a “K” after your final call sign transmission. If you want to answer a call or are chatting with someone, you’d press the ANS button and then type your response/message on the keyboard and it will send it at the speed you’ve set in the menu during setup.
So the question now is, does this thing actually work? And the answer is, well, yes. And it works pretty well, too. Mostly. Sort of.
Back on Sept. 27 I was playing around with it and sent a CQ a few times to see if I could make a contact. I didn’t, but I pulled up the Reverse Beacon Network and plugged in my callsign and there I was.
Now that’s not bad, 8 stations heard me transmitting at 3 watts using a magloop antenna set up next to my kitchen table? Several of them over 1,000 miles away? Neat.
So what about receiveing and that decoder thingie? Does that work? Here, see for yourself.
So definitely, yes, it works not only as a receiver but as a CW decoder as well. The advertising over-hypes things a bit and its capabilities are exaggerated, but there’s no doubt it actually does work.
The radio does have problems, though. I already mentioned the 3D printed case and a few other things like the way it changes frequency.
But it’s the decoder that’s an issue here. CW decoders have been around for years, and they all suffer from the same problems, and that includes this one. For them to work properly you need a relatively strong, fade free signal, and someone sending clean, well timed code. And lets face it, a lot of guys out there have a sloppy fist when sending. Varying length dits and dahs, variable spacing between letters and words, etc. This makes it enormously difficult to decode because of all the variables involved. The decoder in the Nomad? I’d rate it a bit above average, but not much better than that.
It struggles badly when the band is crowded with signals. Tuning is very fiddly. Just because a CW signal sounds good to your ear, that doesn’t mean it sounds good to the decoder. I’ve latched onto extremely strong, clear signals that I even me, with my bad hearing, could make out some of it, but the decoder didn’t even recognize it as a CW signal unless I slowly and carefully increased or decreased the frequency until it “caught” it.
I imagine that as I use it more I’ll get used to its little quirks, but…
You know what’s really, really frustrating about this radio? This thing could have been a home run if they’d just paid a little more attention to detail, refined the software and made some changes here and there.
On the off chance someone at MorseNexus is reading this, here are a few suggestions.
Start with a better looking case. 3D printed is just fine, but for heaven’s sake use a halfway decent printer! Modern 3D printers like my Bambu P2S does such a good job that it’s difficult to tell the stuff it puts out was made with a filament printer at all. And the materials available for printing are light years better than what was used to make this case.
Use a larger screen. There are excellent 7″ touch screens out there that are better than what you’re using, and are in the $35 – $65 price range. Really excellent ones can be had for around $100.
An added benefit of going with a larger screen is that you could move a lot of the awkward keyboard controls to soft buttons on a larger screen.
I don’t know what kind of hardware/processor the Nomad is running so I don’t know if this is possible, but while CW is fun and all of that, what this radio could really benefit from is adding the JS8Call protocol to it. JS8 uses much the same extremely efficient system FT8 uses, but can be used for actual communications.
Absolutely you need to add protective circuitry to the transmitter so the danger of blowing the transmitter from just turning the radio on without an antenna or dummy load goes away.
Changing frequency like you do now? It sucks. I’m sorry, but it just sucks big time. You need a rotary encoder, a knob or rotary control over some kind set in the case to change frequency.
What I’d like to see is a Nomad or Nomad like transceiver that has the Ditstorm Cypher decoding technology built into it, along with JS8Call capabilities, a 7 or 10 inch display, in a nice, attractive, self contained portable package. I’m sure that would increase manufacturing costs dramatically. It would probably require a more powerful processor, more memory, upgraded components, etc. but I for one would absolutely buy one.
But enough. That’s the Nomad. It’s a decent, fun little QRP CW transceiver and I’m enjoying it a great deal and hopefully I’ll get out on the road with it either on the bike or in the car to try making contacts from strange and exotic places like, oh, the Walmart parking lot or something?
Oh, I almost forgot. I mentioned controversy regarding these radios, didn’t I? Let’s take a look at what the issue is here.
It concerns CW decoders in general. If you want to see what I mean go to one of the forums on QRZ or one of the other places hams hang out and dare to suggest that CW decoders are a good thing. If you do, wear a heavy rain coat, high boots and face protection because I guarantee the shit will fly. As far as the “good ole boys” are concerned, CW decoders are the spawn of Satan. They had to smelt their own copper ore to make wire, had to blow their own glass to make vacuum tubes, and damn it, if they had to learn CW the “hard way”, so do you. Decoders don’t work. At all, they will tell you, and their use will lead to insanity, blindness, leprosy, and the end of the world as we know it.
Now things have moderated a bit over the last, oh, 10 years or so. A lot of hams don’t give a fig if you use a decoder or not. They’re just happy that you’re using your radio and having fun with it. But there are always a few jerks lurking in the woodwork waiting to pounce on someone who dares to do something contrary to their beliefs.
So when Morse Nexus came out with it’s first decoder/transceiver, it was met with considerable scorn from the amateur radio community. Even after the ARRL reviewed one and discovered it was a relatively decent little radio, it didn’t seem to matter.
I choose to ignore the “good ole boys” and so should you. I have hearing issues. Thanks to severe tinnitus and nerve damage, I have extreme difficulty deciphering CW. There’s no way I could carry on an actual conversation with someone except under extremely rare circumstances without resorting to a decoder. And there are a lot of people like me with hearing damage or even completely deaf who would love to use CW, and can with a decoder. So the good ole boys? Feck them. And the horse they rode in on.
Coming soon. Maybe? I also picked up one of these from MoresNexus
This is their stand alone super duper supposedly AI powered decoder. I haven’t had a chance to even take it out of the box yet but if half of the claims they make for this are true, this could be very interesting indeed. I think I’ll have to dig out my Yaesu FT-818 to be able to test this one so it may be a while before I get around to this one.
And that’s it for now.
If you’re looking for me babbling about farming, gardening, photography or one of the usual topics I go wandering off on, you might want to skip this one. I’m going to jump off the deep end into the “miracle of radio” for a moment here, specifically amateur radio.
Perhaps the biggest change was when the FCC dropped the need to know morse code in order to get a license. While most accepted this, and even were in favor of it, a significant number of AROs rose up in righteous anger over it.
