That is all.



( For those interested in buying one of these )




 

Possibly... I want one of the mobiles, too.  I was thinking of the FT8800/8900 or Kenwood TM-V71G, but hell, the display on the Yaesu is fantastic and it's in the same price range as the Kenwood.

I wonder what that bastard will cost?

List Price:   $640.00


For a HT

Mmmmkay....I think I'm all set thanks.

As much as I want to get one, I have the FTM-400DR.  We have a fusion repeater in our area.  But no one uses it for digital.  So it would do me no good to have a C4FM HT just for those capabilities, at that cost.  

ya...no

You can honestly get into TRBO cheaper than that…

Making incremental advances instead of going with modern tech... FAIL!

Check out http://en.runbo.net/

Its a rugged cell phone with a 1w UHF/VHF transmitter.

Yank out the cellular stuff, replace the UHF/VHF parts with a more powerful transceiver. Even make it SDR. You have a platform anyone can develop for. Tons of memory and storage. Tons of CPU.

Talked to Yaesu and ICOM at Dayton last year and brought this up. Was told that nobody wants it and nobody would buy it.

I am going to buy one.

But I will wait until Dayton to do it.
I already have the mobile.

I could get into TRBO cheaper, however there are no TRBO repeaters in this area.. There are however Fusion repeaters. And FWIW: I am not looking for the cheapest HT out there to begin with.

 

^^^^^^^^  This


I have one on pre-order at GIGAPARTS.  I dont buy POS cheap chink shit.  And I dont mind spending money on good Yaesu gear.


The FUSION repeater and digital mode is going to overtake DSTAR quickly if they hold their prices down.  The FT1D Is still under 300$ for a GPS Digital radio. And the FUSION repeaters are now $500 shipped for ANY owner of a coordinated repeater.  Don't need the club call now.

What a horribly disappointing radio. Monochrome touchscreen (it's not specified but I'm betting that's resistive and non-multitouch), 320x240 (!!!) optional camera, just over 1k memories. Capable of doing everything every other dual bander before it could do, plus a little proprietary selective calling.

Features:
- Dual watch. Which every other decent dualbander has.
- Wide Band Receiver. AM/FM only. And given a 2m antenna, pretty much useless. Give it a full size antenna and the front end will be overloaded. FM broadcast and AM aviation is cool.
- Loud audio... k. I've never had a problem with an HT being too quiet.
- 1200/9600 baud TNC. Should probably be a standard feature these days since it can be implemented in software, but whatever. A USB sound card interface would be more useful. Add a prolific chip for a few more pennies and you can program it over the same port.
- "Digital Group Monitor". APRS and SELCAL.
- "Backtrack Function to Return to Departure Point" - basic functionality of every GPS ever. Nifty, but I'd rather have new features related to, you know, ham radio. If I'm going on a serious backpacking trip, I'm taking my Garmin 62s. I can't think of a lot of scenarios where I'd need a GPS but not brought one yet happened to have an HT with me.
- "Snapshot Picture Taking Capability" - this is the most laughably insulting feature ever offered on an HT. 160x120 or 320x240 pixels. Let me point out that this is 0.07 megapixels (for the "high" resolution mode. The low resolution mode is 0.01 megapixels). Even the $35 firefox phone has a better camera than that. Thanks to everyone having a smartphone (except the designers of this gold plated brick), high resolution tiny fixed focus cameras are CHEAP these days. Let us not forget the Kenwood VC-H1 which spoke SSTV and had a camera with 512x492 resolution.. in 1998.
- Automatic analog/C4FM detection. Cool
- 5 watts, LiOn battery - standard stuff.

There are two of them in my AO and 1 has been nothing but problems. That said I am thinking about getting one for my repeater site back home

There are 5 Fusion repeaters in San Antonio, and all of them work 100% in both modes.

I'm actually trying to talk the local club into replacing both their 70 cm repeater,  their 2m TM-261 hack job, and both DSTAR repeaters (which don't get used) with two at the same site…since as of right now none of the existing 4 get used by anyone.

 


I think your going to see more and more older repeaters for sale soon, being replaced the DR1.  To me it's a no brainier




I've seen the repeater list for YSF increase to 250 quickly


 

Retailers are saying about MAY 5th these should be in-stock....

I ended up buying into the Fusion thing with the mobile rig.

I quickly became dissatisfied with the radio and the whole premise of Fusion in an of itself. So, the other day, I sold my FT-400 at a loss and am moving on to something else in ham radio.

This decision was reached through a combination of philosophy, hardware, as well as practical use.  I have nothing against other people buying into it, but I decided it is not for me.

 

The Ftm400 is a good rig too.  Sometimes it just dont float your boat.  Move on to something else.

There was a lot that I didn't like about the radio, and there were a few things I did like about the radio. Mostly didn't though.
It wasn't the operation of the radio, that was fine. I really liked the operation of the radio, the big display, the touch screen, I liked the layout of the menus.............

However, it pisses me off that the radio is made from the ground up to have a detached control head. In fact, there is no way to attach the control head to the radio box. Ok, that's fine. That's one of the reasons I bought it.
So, you have a cable from the control head to the radio box. So you have to run that cable. But did they put microphone audio, PTT, or speaker audio in that cable bundle ? No. So now you have to run three seperate cables. Oh, they put a speaker in the box.............which is remote mounted. Great.
Then you get into the microphone. Again, the radio is remote mounted. So they give you a microphone cable that is two feet long. So now you have to homebrew a cable to extend the microphone cable. Why ?
You can also get a camera microphone. Ok, that's kinda cool. I don't have any real need for it, but it is a cool gadget. You can BUY an extension cable for that microphone. So now you have a camera microphone and lose all the functionality of the original microphone since none of those controls are duplicated on the camera microphone  (DTMF pad, the ability to control various functions of the radio through the microphone...........). You CAN use both microphones, both connected to the radio at once which is nice since I wanted the controls on the original microphone............That is, IF you homebrew another cable for the original mic so it reaches the operating position AND you bought or homebrewed an extension for the camera mic. And run yet another cable up to where you are using the radio.
You could eliminate most of these microphone problems if you use a Bluetooth headset (which is another option that you can BUY AND INSTALL). I did that, but I don't really want to drive around with a Bluetooth headset on all the time. Especially if there is no activity on the repeater, but you want to listen in case there is activity on the repeater. Another option that I played with was running the audio into my car stereo.  I put this radio in a Honda CRV with doesn't have a lot of real estate to mount all this stuff. This worked OK, but again, if there was nothing on the repeater and you wanted to listen to music, you had to change inputs on the car stereo and then you never know if anybody got on the repeater. Obviously this isn't the fault of the radio itself, although having a jack on the control head to connect a speaker, or having a speaker actually IN the control head would have made things a lot easier. FWIW: some of the Chinese radios DO have a speaker in the control head.
Then you have the camera mic, that has no viewfinder. You have no idea if you captured the image you wanted to until after you take the picture and see it on the screen of the control head.

I don't know, maybe I am an weird. To ME, if you have a radio with a remote control head, you don't mount the radio box right next to it. You put the radio box in the trunk, or under the seat or something. Otherwise, what's the point ? So they had a nice idea with poor execution. Yeah, I could overcome all those obstacles and I did. However, I don't think I should have to. Which pissed me off. And I was already somewhat pissed off that Yeasu chose to go with their own digital voice codec for no good reason that I can think of; other than the fact that Japanese radio manufacturers insist on making everything proprietary just for the sake of doing so. The two things combined pissed me off enough that I decided not to buy into it.
I showed them.

Every time I buy a radio from the Japanese "Big Three" I regret it. They are not making cutting edge gear, they are not making well thought out gear..................And their whole business model where they make everything so nothing interchanges with anything else (often including their own other equipment) sucks. Why arn't the microphone connectors all the same.?  Why arn't the data cables all the same ? Why arn't the headphone jacks all the same ? Why don't they use a digital voice codec that other people are using so you can talk to other hams ?  The only hams I can talk to are people that bought Yeasu radios. Why would you have a connector for a CW key that is a different size phone plug than another CW key jack ON THE SAME YEASU RADIO ?
This list could go on for a half hour.
Why ? Because we keep buying this shit and supporting them. And I am just as guilty as anyone else.

Seems foolish to give up a repeater coordination(and I personally would prefer to have Fusion repeaters in digital-only mode and keep the old analog repeaters up), but surely there are ways to encourage activity on the machines. Just need to be a little proactive about it.





As far as Fusion goes, I'm not enthusiastic on the quality of the repeaters, or the capabilities of the overall system. I have an FT1DR for Fusion and an IC-7100 for D-Star, and there are plenty of issues to complain about with both systems. Neither radio was purchased with digital voice usage in mind, they were bought because of their other features. I'm more likely to look into DMR for actual digital voice.





 

 

I'm not gonna argue with you on this.  Its your opinions.


But yeah you aren't gonna be pleased with this radio.  

So only one out of the four is actually coordinated (the 70 cm machine) which also happens to be in the second best location (best depending on what band) within a 120 mile radius.

Secondly, they have the mindset of let's put up repeaters as we can never have too many. We are talking about a county where there are supposedly 20+ 2m/70 cm repeaters and you can scan them all day long for a month straight and only hear 5 but only hear activity on 3 (the GMRS repeaters actually have more activity on them). They also just throw stuff together and calling it good. Instead of taking time to actually engineer the systems and build them properly they just want to throw them up. You can polish shit all you want…it's still going to be a turd sitting in your hand.

What I suggested was simply replacing the existing 70 cm repeater (same location, same antenna, same ERP) with dual Fusion repeaters not really an upgrade to the UHF, just an update but a major upgrade location wise to the VHF repeater (which is simply two TM-261's hacked together to form a low duty repeater) and then linking the two together to have a cross-banded repeater setup (which helps people who have single band VHF radio's in a town where UHF is king).

The thing I was really trying to emphasize with the Fusion repeaters was one location, one user's manual, and that it didn't take a ton of knowledge to change little settings on the systems here and there.

Retailers say End of June now.  It was delayed yet again.

After the Anytone Termn-8R I wonder if the FCC is taking a hard look at any applications looking for anything out of the ordinary.

It was approved several months ago.  The holdup isint FCC, if thats what you were talking about.

It was.  I was just speculating.  Glad to hear it was approved, sad to hear its delayed.

 
Yeah it was approved I think in Early march.


Yaesu said initially it would be available April, now been delayed twice.

Got my radio in today.

Been fussing with it between calls and now, at the house.


The AUTO digital/FM mode is qwerky. Not sure if its me not knowing how to use it, or if theres still bugs in the repeater firmware.  But it wasn't AUTO completely.


We'll see what happens with that.


Otherwise, it's a nice radio. Menus are easy to navigate, and I only needed the manual to find where the tone settings, squelch settings were and the menu system is easy to navigate and make sense.


LOTS of features, options, settings.    APRS, Digital, FM, wide band recieve, WX Alert stuff, etc.

The guy I go to Dayton with got an email that his has been shipped.

Is the screen resistive or capacitative?