I picked up one of the 100 that Alinco released this morning. I'll put together a review as soon as I get home.

I picked up one as well, early in the morning. Need to see if any of the Alinco dealers have accessories for it. Nice little radio, and it is a cross-band full-duplex (for 2m/70cm - did not test with 1.2 GHz) HT as advertised. Tuning steps as small as 5 kHz on all bands means that - with a suitable antenna, and probably an amplifier - it could be made to work on AO-51's L-band FM uplink. Dayton price is $299, much better than I had expected. In Japan, Alinco's MSRP is at 57000 yen (about US$ 600), so I thought it would be closer to $400 even here at Dayton.

Without accessories, I disabled the full-duplex capability as not to cause feedback on one AO-27 pass I tried with it this afternoon. I stood on the Indiana/Ohio state line, down the street from my motel (west of Dayton, near I-70), and tried it with an Elk log periodic. Separate knobs for volume and VFO on each band are just like the IC-W32A. The receiver may not be as sensitive as the IC-W32A, or it seemed like that this afternoon. I'll play with it more, to get a better idea of how it stacks up against other radios I've used.

I already received one comment via e-mail after that AO-27 pass this afternoon related to the new HT. It mentioned that my audio was low and sounded compressed. The HT has a mic gain menu setting from 1 to 4 - 1 is "quiet", 4 is "loud" per the manual. Out of the box, it was at 3. It has already been moved up to 4, ready for the next time I get on the birds with it.

73!

Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK - currently in Richmond IN http://www.wd9ewk.net/