AOR AR-DV10 Review

I was intending to write a full review of the AOR DV10 receiver but its performance is so bad I would class it not fit for purpose. Here’s why….

When Yaesu say they have been working together with AOR to produce a receiver, you at least expect it to work as per the specification and advertisements, alas it does not. Yaesu claim:-

“YAESU is proud to announce that AOR, a leading radio manufacturer in the professional / government sector, and YAESU has been working together to develop a new SDR handheld receiver, AR-DV10, and AOR has decided to distribute the new SDR handheld receiver in the North America through YAESU distribution channels.”

Lets get one thing straight, the DV10 is not fit for consumer / hobby use, let alone professional or goverment use!

Although VHF performance seems ok, but not great, UHF DMR performance is dismal, the Uniden BCD436HP way out performs it as shown in my video and I was struggling to understand how the AOR DV10 was so bad, then I found it, at UHF the DV10 is 3kHz off frequency, now bearing in mind some channels, in particular NXDN are offset by 3.125kHz that brings into perspective how bad the AR-DV10 is, 3kHz off frequency makes it useless!

The latest firmware is a broken mess, some of the remote commands cause the radio to lock so solid the battery has to be pulled, the AR-DV10 sometimes hangs when a recording to the SD card finishes, it feels like some DIY prototype that never quite got finished.

The DMR bandwidth is set wrong, its too wide, it should be FM6 not FM15, maybe it was left deliberately wide to try and cater for ridiculous frequency error.

Conclusion, its not finished, not fit for purpose and should be removed from sale until things are fixed.

Since publishing my findings on the DV10 performance many others have found the exact same problems, whilst reviewing the HF performance of the DV10 we have found the unit drifts 300Hz on the Shannon Volmet frequency of 5505kHz, the DV10 has to be tuned to 5504.7kHz, this drift equates to 54.5ppm which is more than 10 times the specification value of 5ppm.

We have asked both AOR and Yaesu for a proper technical statement regarding the issues.

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