ICOM’s R-8500, IC-7300, IC-7610 and IC-9700 are making huge impacts on AROs everywhere. This is no surprise to those of us familiar with SDR technology; older analog radio designs simply cannot offer the kinds of performance advantages a good SDR design can.
However, one thing these radios from ICOM have in common are some poor design choices; spectrum span choices are crippled compared to a center/demodulator tuning scheme; spectrums and waterfall displays that are insufficiently adjustable; noise blankers in the least useful portion of the signal path; insufficient “knobbiness”, so that the user interface of the radio is a great deal more clumsy than it actually needs to be.
The opportunity for Kenwood and Yaesu is clear: there’s an opening here to step in and knock ICOM off the hill they climbed up on.
Imagine a stand-alone SDR transceiver where:
- You could conveniently place the spectrum/waterfall anywhere
- You could adjust the amplitude/level of the waterfall and spectrum separately
- The noise blanker reduced the noise on the display as well as in the audio
- The display was capable of high resolution output to a monitor
- Transmit pre-distortion provided very high quality TX
- Important controls were given their own front panel placement
- Full mouse/trackball integration was standard
- Broadband IQ output was available for external use
- Multiband EQ and compression / limiting for TX audio was provided
These are just some of the obvious places where ICOM’s radios, thus far, have fallen woefully short.
Yaesu? Kenwood? Where art thou?
