Xiegu GNR1 Digital NR & Filter - Trial Run.

Today I received the Xiegu GNR1 Digital NR & Filter that I purchased recently on eBay.  

It came well packaged as is typical of Xiegu, but lacked any useful manual. It did however come with a 110/240v to 12vDC power supply and US to AU pin adapter (that will go in the bin). 

I hooked it up to the Icom IC-706Mk2G on the trusty flag pole dipole. I found a reasonable sounding QSO on 40m to get started with. 

I could hear one party quite well, though with plenty of noise. The other party less so.  In the video, you can briefly see my S meter between S7 and S9 - that was also my noise floor at 9.30am. (As I write a few hours later it's a solid S9). 

It's fairly hard to convey the full improvement given that I've jumped from audio routed out a set of PC speakers to the radio speaker then back. My PC speakers have a lot of low end as I prefer to knock the treble out of audio a bit in order to keep my tinnitus under control. 

My first observation is that it needs quite fine adjustment - much like filter controls on a radio, things do get a bit weird and wild if you start turning knobs at speed. Very fine adjustment goes a long way. 

I was able at least to hear both parties quite well with limited need for adjustment once I got them dialled in. I was hoping to spend a little more time playing around with it, but alas as time marched on towards 10am, 40m went quiet as the noise floor went up. 

I just found another in progress QSO that was buried under the noise when I started hunting around, but seems to have improved as I prepared to record. You can certainly tell the difference as I start to wind up the NR (top left knob). I couldn't hear much of this QSO that well - most of it was simply too muffled and I spent a lot of time fine tuning all whilst conditions seemed to improve around it moving the goal posts of me. 

By the time it was completely audible, I was too busy trying to record it. 

Apologies for the orientation. I don't have a video editor installed on my PC...

So far probably the only thing I'd really like is a bypass button. It you turn it off, you have no audio. Sometimes when it's dialed in, I don't necessarily want to adjust anything at all and would simply like a button that just.. bypasses.. the whole thing. When your noise floor is so high that the S meter really isn't that useful (for example, in the time between recording the above and getting it uploaded. my noise floor is now S9+10db), it'd feel somewhat reassuring to be able to hear the signal just to make sure that I'm not a complete idiot without touching anything else. 

Looking forward to more playing when I have time to get serious with it.