They say older folks don't need much sleep. So last night as I tossed and turned, I got out of bed and used the scanner function to chase down what I knew was gonna be a collection of birdies & spurs that I knew from the past two years experience were hiding in the radio.
(Back when I was workin' at R.L. Drake and we had the TR7 in production, the game from engineering was if you could hear a birdie and it went dim with the radio connected to an antenna, we could ignore it. Ol' Steve Whitefield did a bunch of work eliminating the birdies & spurs that didn't go dim. So that's my benchmark: a 40 year old radio. ;-) )
So here's the list of what I found (and I went back and tuned through to verify that I was not hallucinating at 3 am) with no antenna connected. Some were monster easy to hear (the one at ~28.4 is particularly atrocious); others were just audible and might have gone dim with a decent antenna connected. YMMV &c.:
160m: 1875, 1888, 1970, 2000
75/80m: 3600, 3696, 3888, 3925
60m: 5375, 5395, 5443, 5500
40m: 7029, 7074, 7162, 7200, 7204
30m: 10059, 10096
20m: 14192, 14229, 14288
17m: 18095
15m: 21030, 21088, 21162
12m: 24896
10m: 28362, 28400, 28629, 28668, 28688
6m: 50000, 51087, 52000, 52129
Back two years when I first got this radio, I had noticed these points and got a bit aggrieved about it. OCD stuff, maybe. Anyway, I got over that and continued to use the radio -- and still do -- but some of these points are dead center to useful or commonly held QRP frequencies & places where the DX may hang out. So, when I finally fell into the arms of Morpheus, I wondered how much of this may still be evident in the next generation of the radio (of which many have spoken and for which many have already sprung).?
And, as I finally passed out & the sun began to rise, I had to admit that the X5105 is still a better radio than the Chinese uSDX boxes on eBay ;-)
Nils / W8IJN
Nils R. Bull Young