After a long wait, my ANAN-7000DLE MKII has arrived from India. This transceiver has the best diversity receiver I could afford.

Earlier this year, I published an article on state of the art in ham radio diversity receivers. You might remember my conclusion that ANAN is the only manufacturer offering true baseband adjustable dual channel coherent receivers. All the other choices make you do diversity reception in your head.

So, I bit the pricey bullet and ordered my ANAN-7000DLE MKII transceiver from Apache Labs. When I placed the order, they told me COVID-related delays in the order of 8-12 weeks should be expected. As a sweetener, Apache Labs offered an extra year of warranty and free delivery. I chose the Black Edition, the one without a built-in PC.

Well, it took 16 weeks from order to final delivery. And DHL managed to deliver it to my (thankfully honest) next door neighbor!

Everything was in the box, but that’s not saying much. A radio, power cable and four rubber feet. You need to attach the rubber feet to provide airflow clearance to the fan on the bottom panel. My ANAN-7000DLE MKII is somewhat heavy at 10 kg (22 pounds) of steel chassis: definitely appears to be solid and well put together. Slightly smaller than my Flex 6300, but half the weight.

As you can see above, this radio provides BNC connectors for 3 main antennas, and another for receiver only on the second receiver. Connectivity is all done by Ethernet on your local area network. As a nice touch, you can also attach two quality speakers to the main box.

My ANAN-7000DLE MKII is OpenHPSDR

Apache Labs is an interesting and somewhat mysterious company based in Melbourne, Australia with manufacturing in India. You will notice Apache Labs only makes hardware based on the OpenHPSDR Project. Since 2005, OpenHPSDR has designed and fabricated high performance SDR modules.

The most famous product is the Hermes board, and now its successor Orion MKII which offers dual phase coherent ADC receiver chains. Orion MKII is used in my ANAN-7000DLE MKII. Unlike my Flex radio, all of the firmware in and software for the ANAN radios is open-sourced. I am familiar with the PowerSDR software used for GUI, as I have used it extensively with my Afedri AFE8222x two-channel receiver.

So, now it’s time to hook my baby up!