> Spend the extra money and get the Icom IC-A23. You will be much > happier. I have used mine in the KR all over the USA and never have had > any problems. They have great customer service as well if you do have > any issues. They are very helpful with phone support as well. > > Before I bought my 23 and 23 sport, I asked the guys at will call at the > Calif. Spruce what their experience had been. I was told the others are > returned quite a bit more often than the Icom. Just my .02. >
The Icom radio performs really well as a radio, but what a pest to drive, I hate the fiddly key sequences to try and programme in a frequency, or even to manually set the frequency. When things go pear-shaped, fiddling with the Icom is not fun ! On the Icom web site, it says that there is a PC link for the programming the radio. All their scanners are computer tunable, and some of the older high-end transceivers can also be computer drivable, which makes sense. So I figured that they must test the radio via this computer interface - which uses the tip, ring and sleeve of the audio jack as a low speed RS232. I thought it would be really cool to be able to integrate the radio with the laptop based GPS, just click on the map, and bingo the radio gets tuned. So I contacted Icom to get the info on how to do it and they deny that the feature exists. Drat, drat, drat
