[ICOM] Icom IC-756ProIII or TS-850SAT???

[Alex]

From: "Robert Chudek" <k0rc at pclink.com>

> I don't like all the fan noise of the Icom compared to the Kenwood. 

Maybe it's me, and perhaps I'm just tuning it out, but I can barely hear the fans in the PIII. 

> I swapped out 
> the Icom PS-125 because it was a second device with a fan making noise.

The fan in that PS is a lot louder than the fans in the PIII. But in all it's not that bad compared to the secondary A/C I have to run in my shack to keep things cool. :)

I always use a headset in contests, even in digital contests. And at the same time I feed the audio to an external amplifier with speakers. So all the noise I don't want to hear gets drowned out by the noises coming from the radio itself. So if any external sound still makes it to my ears with the headset on, it's audio coming from the trx. That works much better than trying to cancel external noises I think.

> The one feature I really find lacking on the Icom is stereo receive.

That sounds like a good candidate for a mod. Much better than messing with the addition of the Inrad roofing filter that seems to cause quite a bit of problems.

I too find the mono feed of both signals annoying.

> There are a few important CAT commands missing in the Icom.

I never realized that. I'll have to check that out. Thanks for brining it up.

> On the plus side, the Pro III has a special RTTY filter that pulls weak 
> signals out of the noise like I have never seen (heard) before. It's 
> incredible. The other digital capabilities have already been discussed so I 
> won't spend time on them. The built-in RTTY decoder on the Icom is novel, 
> but almost useless - you can receive fine, and you can transmit using stored 
> messages, but there is no keyboard interface that allows you to carry on a 
> keyboard to keyboard QSO. For example, you can call CQ, and send a canned 
> signal report, name, qth, etc... but you can't send the other fellows 
> callsign. You would have to program a different callsign each time you made 
> a QSO. It's not impossible, but it's very impractical. I still give Icom 
> kudos for including RTTY decoding in the design. I think it has helped bring 
> more digital operators to the mode.
> 
> The antenna tuner works fine, but my antennas are pretty close to 50 ohms so 
> I don't know how well it would tune a piece of wire laying on the driveway. 

Not. I find internal antenna tuners virtually useless unless your antennas are within a 3:1 match. All my antennas are ladder line fed and use baluns to convert to coax at the entrance to the shack. The impedances I try to match are way outside that of what internal tuners can match. 

I often wondered that if they bother putting all the electronics and algorithms for a tuner in a radio, why not add some fixed inductors and a few fixed capacitors to extend the range of a tuner so it would be more useful. 

> recently released for the Pro III by International Radio: 
> http://www.inrad.net/product.php?productid=225 

I hear on the topband reflector that the filter seems to drift and that they're possibly wider than advertised.

It's too band that many manufacturer's insist on including FM in their designs. If they'd just omit that, they could use a much narrower roofing filter than the 15kHz they'd have to use to pass FM signals.

73,
--Alex KR1ST
http://www.kr1st.com