[K3PZN-List] IC-2720 First Impressions

[Andy Leeds]

I broke down this week and got a new mobile rig, the new IC-2720. It 
showed up today and I thought I'd share my initial impressions with 
everyone.

I set it up on the bench and connected it to my service monitor and ran 
a few quick tests. On both bands the output power looked good, although 
I only saw 47.8W max on 2m (0.2dB won't matter much in any case).

The receiver tested very good - I switched from monitor to generate mode 
on the R2600 and the squelch on the Icom opened up. When I went to turn 
down the generator I couldn't - it was at -130dBm... a little 
attenuation later and I estimate that I was seeing squelch break down 
about -133dBm (its a little hard to tell since I had jumer 
cable-BNC-PL259-N adapter and gender changer hell going on at this 
point). The SINAD tests were in line with the advertised specs. I did 
observe that the right band was about 1.5dB less sensitve on 2m vs the 
right band. The good news here is the manual states a much worse number 
than I got .18uV left side and .45uV right side or about 4dB, the moral 
here is the UHF side of the rig dosn't perform quite as well on 2m if 
you throw the thing into VHF/VHF mode so in that case put the weaker 
signal on the left.

Looking at the audio response I found that the CTCSS squelch would open 
with .2 kHz of deviation. In comparison several of the other rigs I have 
here all seem to reliably detect a tone at around .35kHz or so. On the 
transmit audio I found I only drove it about 1.8-2.4 kHz talking as I 
normaly do. A little work on the menus and I discoverd the default 
setting is low mic gain. After changing that it showed 2.8-3.5kHz.

Moving this project out to the garage I discovered that while ICOM is 
shipping the remote mounting cable as standard you have to buy an option 
to mount the control head to the front of the radio. This sorta forced 
me into the remote head situation even though I wasn't planning it. This 
is where I discovered one thing I dislike - the control head mount is T 
shaped, two screws run vertical to mount the bracket and two screws run 
into the back of the control head horizontaly. The end result of this 
configuration is that the head must be mounted to the bracket first 
which in turn makes it harder to see (and I now care about dropping the 
thing while mounting it) and a bit more trouble to deal with.

In any case the programming is similar to most recent ICOMs I've messed 
with and it didn't take long to get the memory that I actualy use into 
it. In any case nothing made me want to send it back.
Hope I didn't get to long winded.

73,
Andy