SDG #366 Geeboon C470 380W finally tops Metcal power!

This Geeboon 380 W soldering station is built to drive the full JBC handpiece range and in particular the large C470 cartridges, intended for lugs, cables and busbar rather than PCB rework. It is sold only by Geeboon, goes in and out of stock, and cost around £100 delivered. The kit contains a standard T245 style handpiece that accepts both C245 and C470 cartridges, two Geeboon C470 cartridges of about 15 mm and 10 mm, a folded metal cradle with a banana socket for the sleep sensor, and a 220 mm deep control unit with a colour TFT, rotary encoder and USB port.

Inside are two identical 24 V switch mode supplies and a relay that places them in series to provide 48 V for C470 cartridges. The front panel board carries a GD32F303 microcontroller, a Hall effect current sensor, thermocouple conditioning and an HYG2000P10 MOSFET rated at 80 A that hard switches DC into the heater with only a thermal pad to the chassis. Earthing is weak: the inlet earth reaches the tip through a 1 ohm resistor on a small rear board and the chassis is poorly bonded, so an extra earth wire was added during the review.

The menu covers temperature limits up to 480C, step size, adjustable peak power, a graph theme, sleep by cradle, power detection or vibration, three presets, offset and multipoint calibration, and an exposed P loop gain that the graph shows could use tuning. Calibration was within a couple of degrees at 350C. A four layer board, 25 mm² meter tails and a copper busbar all soldered with ease, and the busbar test showed more heating capability than the Metcal with its large tip, making this the first station on the channel to beat it on raw power.