On Sun, 2010-03-07 at 19:51 -0500, Jeff KB2M wrote:
Years ago I did a test of the various handheld radio's available for sat use. I rated the TH-F6A a distant last. Reason is that its front-end is very sensitive to inter-mod. The test was performed in front of HRO in DE. See my HT test report on my webpage. It can be found by navigating to QRZ.com then lookup kb2m. I also remember when I was on a business trip to Houston. While there I meet with Jerry k5oe, Bruce kk5do, and Al n5afv for dinner(I have a picture of the group if anyone is interested). After dinner we went to the parking lot to work an FM bird. As my F6A was deaf from the urban inter-mod I had to borrow someone's HT to finish making a contact. When I got home I sold the Kenwood. It might be good out in the country, but it sucks in the city!...
I found that my TH-F7E is badly affected by "pager rip" in certain spots around Glasgow, especially with an external antenna. Oddly enough, some of the high sites on tower blocks I maintain are really bad, and some are practically silent.
Using it for satellite it seems that the diplexer in my homebrew crossed yagi knocks enough of the out-of-band crap out to prevent this. It's not nearly so bad for intermod on UHF as it is on VHF, too. This could be because there are fewer UHF high-power paging transmitters here (just a wee bit of mobitex, mostly).
Gordon MM0YEQ