I have one which I received in July after waiting for 2+ months. I have the latest, as of today, firmware installed.
My experience with mine is that the RX sensitivity does not meet specifications, and the sub band is worse than the main band. I have an old Icom IC-T7H, same published specification, for comparison. With the same location exactly, same antenna exactly, distant repeaters which are full quieting on the IC-T7H are scratchy on the main band, and worse or unreadable on the sub band. This has been my experience as well with my Elk antenna and AO-51, though doing A/B testing is much harder there. This is with wideband receive off, all attenuation off. The sub band sensitivity is the same, not transmitting, with full duplex on or off. I see the same extreme desense when transmitting in full duplex. I have experimented with using it for an APRS digi, as it is unlikely to ever be a truly viable satellite rig. For that, it works very well with a few caveats. First, the squelch is very slow opening, so it is better to operate with it open and use tone detection. Surprisingly, there is no preemphasis going through the microphone jack, so you need to add in the twist externally. The cloning software is more like alpha than beta. There are several things which either don't work, or crash. In one case, the crash is the kind that gets you a "Report to Mother Microsoft" message. However, they are working on it, and with each new release it is more useful. It will probably be a neat package for ordinary usage when they get finished beta testing it. There have been several improvements, including some not covered in the release notes, in the firmware updates. Alan WA4SCA _______________________________________________ Sent via amsat...@amsat.org. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
