It’s called Wouxun. Paid $118 for the radio with antenna and charger. Free programming software on the web.
I believe this is happening at some of the Chinese contract manufacturers.
When buying [a well-known brand of] routers and switches on eBay, I used to get units which appeared to come from “dumpster diving” at the factory or repair center - the units would appear complete, but things like the front panel LEDs wouldn’t be mounted properly, just held in by tape, and a bunch of the screws would be missing.
More recently, it looks like the factory itself is “running off a few extra copies” in addition to the quantity ordered by [name brand] - they come complete with all accessories, in original sealed packaging, with all of the right serial number stickers and holograms. They just cost less than 5% of list price :eek:
Running a bit past the contracted number for private gain has long been a ploy to make some additional profit. Not just electronics, but almost any goods made under contract. Sunglasses are another one I know of.
Serial numbers will look legit, but won’t match the real vendor’s list of sold items, so for high value goods, they will probably notice if you try to get service. Overuns will probably not have gone thought the same level of QA as the vendor sourced ones (after all, if you were doing an overrun. why would you bother?)
Those overruns could be items that failed QA. Usually, you account for any losses in the production run by producing more than you need. So, it would not surprise me that if those items that look exactly the same, are in fact, exactly the same, but failed QA for whatever reason. Could be something cosmetic but it could also have something electronically wrong with it. There was also an issue of knock-off brand routers/switches that had compromised firmware and looked like the real deal. But, when investigated they were found to be illegitimate items.
Also, there are a lot of companies that buy the Chinese produced items, have their company name stamped on them, and then sell them in the US or elsewhere. Security cameras come to mind. You can then find those non-branded items via websites like china-vision or whatever. But, support is usually lacking and the return policy, although it might be stated, means having to deal with customer service in China and not a US based business.
Sometimes, they might be out of tolerance, but not so far as to be unusable - one too many dead pixels on a screen, latency a little high on a memory read or write, a little too much noise in an amplifier output, etc.
It’s a gamble - because that might be acceptable and remain so, or it might be an inidication of impending failure - and as discussed above, there’s not likely to be any support when things go wrong.