Hi Alan!

Great preliminary report.  One question.  I haven't been able to locate the size of the stock battery.  The accessory is an 1800 MaH battery.  Is that the typical larger battery, or just a spare the same size?  A friend who is more interested in the APRS side asked me.

There is - so far - only one rechargeable battery pack for this radio: the PB-45L, 7.4V/1800 mAh. The accessory pack is the same model and capacity as what came with the radio.

I give credit to Kenwood for not saddling the radio with a smaller battery pack like Yaesu has done with the VX-8 series, and then offering the higher-capacity battery as an accessory. It might be up to someone like Maha or Batteries America to come out with an after-market battery pack with still larger capacity. Or maybe Kenwood will do that in the future. Kenwood has done that with the TH-F6A; originally it came with a 7.4V/1550 mAh pack, but the new one I just picked up last month came with a Kenwood 7.4V/2000 mAh pack.

As for myself, I would like one, but I have a full up Flex-VU5K and a new HDTV on order, so enough expensive toys, at least until Dayton.

Do you have the VHF/UHF module for your Flex radio? ;-)

73!

Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK http://www.wd9ewk.net/