At dayton, here is what I heard... they can no longer get about a handful of parts. The radio has been in production for 10 years! Of the handful of parts, they have come up with some substitutes for all but one of them. There is still one tiny chip transistor that has no substitutes and impossible to find. Unless they can solve that problem, they are stuck...
That is MOST unfortunate! It is important to operate in full-duplex in Mode J-FM, and with the demise of the Icom IC-W32A, the Kenwood TH-D7AG was the only HT available which had that capability. Every other multi-band HT available commercially tries to be a scanner from DC-to-daylight, and that is inherently incompatable with full- duplex operation. I believe that the number of people who can't hear their own downlink has alot to do with the amount of chaos on the FM satellites.
Please, please, PLEASE!! AMSAT-NA and AMSAT-*, lobby the amateur radio manufacturers to make another satellite-friendly HT! This is important to the future of amateur radio.
-- KD6PAG (Networking Old-Timer, Satellite QRPer)
On Tuesday 03 June 2008 23:07:55 John Mock KD6PAG wrote:
At dayton, here is what I heard... they can no longer get about a handful of parts. The radio has been in production for 10 years! Of the handful of parts, they have come up with some substitutes for all but one of them. There is still one tiny chip transistor that has no substitutes and impossible to find. Unless they can solve that problem, they are stuck...
That is MOST unfortunate! It is important to operate in full-duplex in Mode J-FM, and with the demise of the Icom IC-W32A, the Kenwood TH-D7AG was the only HT available which had that capability. Every other multi-band HT available commercially tries to be a scanner from DC-to-daylight, and that is inherently incompatable with full- duplex operation. I believe that the number of people who can't hear their own downlink has alot to do with the amount of chaos on the FM satellites.
Please, please, PLEASE!! AMSAT-NA and AMSAT-*, lobby the amateur radio manufacturers to make another satellite-friendly HT! This is important to the future of amateur radio.
-- KD6PAG (Networking Old-Timer, Satellite QRPer)
Thats an excellent idea.
It would also be a good thing to make a list of the HT's which can do full duplex. My Icom IC-32AT can, for example, and a friend who got his ham license a few years ago got one with accessories on Ebay for $80. He didn't get it for sat work, but he has it if I can snare him into it. ;-)
--STeve Andre' wb8wsf en82
Hello John
Please, please, PLEASE!! AMSAT-NA and AMSAT-*, lobby the amateur radio manufacturers to make another satellite-friendly HT! This is important to the future of amateur radio.
The problem here as I understand it is that full duplex and wideband receive are not compatible. I would hazard a guess that the manufacturers see wideband dual rx as a more marketable facility than full duplex.
One other facet is that full duplex radios have tended to be larger, possibly due to the size of the filters, although it may be simply that no-one's developed a new one for many years, since the days that HT's tended to be somewhat larger.
I live in vague hope for the Yaesu VX-8 that I got my hands on at Dayton, although this was a preproduction model and I was given a stern warning when I contemplated punching the buttons. There was no 'DUP' key that I could see :-(
73, Howard GJ6LVB
participants (3)
-
Howard Long -
John Mock KD6PAG -
STeve Andre'