Name: zBitx Introduction : The QRP SDR's size and description
Uploaded: 2025-07-20T00:12:06.000Z
Duration: 7 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi, this is an introductory video about the new ZBitX.

The only difference between this and a full-fledged SDR like the SBitX being lower power.

It runs exactly the same software and it's capable of exactly the same things.

So this is also a field radio because of its small size.

So, yeah, it's about 13 actually, 13 ounces in weight without the battery.

So we'll talk about the batteries in a bit.

And this is about less than 5.5 inches across.

And this is about less than 1.5 inches deep.

So you could have put this in your pocket except for the tuning knob.

And tuning knob is actually very critical for radio hams.

So we've retained the tuning knob, although I did try user interfaces without using the tuning knob.

This comes fully built for $149, which is the current price.

It may go up or come down depending on the duty structures prevailing in the international market.

And it runs all digital modes, FLDG, WSJTX, and there are others which will follow.

So apart from the antenna, this is a complete set.

You can add HDMI to this when you're at home so that you can use this with a larger monitor.

And there are certain settings and configurations which are only possible on the large screen.

So you might want to use this when you're at home.

On the USB port, we supply a small dongle which will plug into this and give you a regular USB at the other end.

Right now I've connected it to my Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse.

What's marked here as CAT is actually the second CPU of this system, which is the Pico.

And the Pico basically controls the front panel, so you can use this to upload the firmware for the Pico.

As well as the forthcoming CAT control can happen from this.

So you can actually connect it to your laptop in case you would need that, although everything is built into this itself.

Now you can supply 6 to 9 volts for the rated 5 volts power.

And now the back plate is itself used as a heat sink.

These are the two studs which go through the power transistors inside this.

But otherwise, this will get warm when you're using it.

So it's preferable that instead of keeping it flat like that, you keep it slightly at an angle by putting something underneath it.

Or if you're in the field you can hold it, in which case there's no problem at all.

So that's about the physical dimensions and the connectors etc.

And now I'll just come to the battery in the end.

So the battery, this is a 2 LiPo battery case which is bolted onto the side of this.

You just take out these two screws and this side panel will pop out.

And there are two screws which hold this here.

You can remove these two screws and you're off the battery.

Which might actually reduce the physical dimensions of this.

The reason why we have not given a charger or inbuilt batteries is that if you try charging the batteries while the radio is running, there's a lot of noise which will come into the radio because of the sort of charges that are available.

So instead of that, you have to plug in chargeable cells here and this connects back to the power supply.

The battery case is not integral to the radio itself.

And switching on the radio is fairly simple.

Wherever you have, right now I have about 8.2 volts which is the voltage that I always operate my radio on.

You just have to plug in the wire and there we are.

Now what it will say here is that it's waiting for the SBITX to start.

And that is because the SBITX actually runs on the Raspberry Pi and that being a Linux machine will take about 15 to 20 seconds to boot up.

And here you can see the version which is 1.03 of the firmware.

Probably by the time you see this, we would have moved on to 1.04.

And the way this works is, it's a resistive touch screen.

So whatever you want to touch, you have to essentially tap on that and you'll see this white box which comes around it.

Let me see if I can find another station.

Now these controls here are common to all the modes.

And what you see here, this open wipe to save are part of the logging software.

So this is my log of my attempts at doing everything.

As you can see, I've done a lot of FTAs on this radio.

And you can click and on the radio itself, you can just delete it if you want to, but we'll not do that right now.

For each of the bands, there are four different settings.

So let me go to 15 meters and see if there's anything interesting there at all.

I don't hear anything probably because my high up gain is low.

And I can, the span is too small to see this.

All you need to do is you need to add your call sign.

But we will take this setup in the next video.

I just wanted to show you how the controls work here.

And to switch it off, you just take the power off.