Introduction

ET Model is a recent Chinese AM manufacturer. They are currently producing PE and resin upgrading kits.

Antennas are usually not a real point of interest for the plastic kit producers. Generally vague in details, antenna bases are horrible pieces of plastic with noticeable seam lines. Resin counterparts can be used to replace them but the original functionality (meaning the spring appearance) is not well depicted. I had the chance to work with some ET Model upgrade kits in PE and I was happy to use the ready-made antenna bases with a real spring. It is workable and you can use a stiff material for the antennas as seen in real life.

With this kit, ET model introduce a real nice set for a better representation of the antenna bases.

Contents

The kit is well pack in a ziplock plastic bag, but the kit parts are not further protected which is odd since the resins parts are fragile and small. The content of the kit is the following:
• Three resin sprues of parts
• seven black springs
• four transparent bottles
• an A4 sheet of instructions

review

The kit is pretty easy kit to use. Different antenna bases are provided in order to cover the NATO vehicle range. I was able to identify the antenna bases for the following nationalities:
US, Canadian, French, German, Australian, NZ, Italian.

The construction is pretty easy – shave off your plastic antenna base, select the correct base from the ones provided in the kit, and glue in the aerial. No material is provided for the aerial so the modeler can choose depending on their own requirements and taste. The build is finished by gluing the round safety end on top. To aid the modeler all the resins parts are predrilled, so no tedious drilling activity on a 2mm diameter fragile resin part. Two different antenna bases are provided as well as the connector for the aerial. With this set, you can generate seven different antennas.

Also, four transparent plastic bottles are provided to depict the bottles used to put the chem.-light glow stick inside during night operation.

Surprisingly when sanding off the plastic base, you remove the 4 bolts, but this piece is missing from this kit while you can find it on most similar kits from ET Model.

conclusion

This is an easy build. It is the one upgrade most needed on modern kits.