Peter Hoon, VE1CHS of Nederland, CO traveled to Turkey in the Spring of 2004 and took his SG-2020 with him. He shared some details of the SG-2020's performance with us.

"It was the very last day or so of our trip, and the 12 alkaline batteries we had bargained for and bought at a bazaar in Istanbul 5 weeks earlier were on their last legs.

The antenna radiator had originally been a 75 foot random wire angled from the second story of our pension, just 50M from Lake Iznik, down to an olive tree on a meridian strip right next to a piece of the city wall. Earlier on the night of our CW contact, a large truck had passed on the street below and broken the antenna. But a long enough piece was left for us to tape the end of the random wire onto a small rock wall surrounding the pension. The random wire radiator left was only about 25 feet long, and it was angled only about 6 feet away from the base of the pension. It was a very compromised antenna.

To our amazement, typically running only 3 to 4 watts out from the SG-2020, with a random wire antenna and at most 3 counter-poises, we worked about 80 to 90 percent of all the CW stations we called!

Ours was an amazing contact in 40 years of ham radio: The SG-2020 was in a 2300 year old historical setting, batteries almost dead, broken and compromised antenna radiator close to the building, just a few counter-poises, wee hours of the morning, starting to drizzle on me, and yet we did it!

The SG-2020 has so many great qualities: Can run up to 20 W, can tune in international short wave, terrific SSB audio, best digital noise and bandwidth filters in the industry, 60M op, and it goes on."