Which of these do you like and which would you advise to get? I looking for a 2-meter radio to use as a base station. I'm troubled that the Kenwood TM-281A doesn't have a true low power setting, but I have read that the Yaesu FT-2900R has problems with overheating so I am completely confused as to which is better for me.
We're casual hams, too. All 6 of us in the household, and we tend to just talk to each other to coordinate our activities rather than go to the ham club repeater and look for idle chit-chat. I looked at both the Kenwood and Yaesu radios for my family's vehicles. For us, the most important thing is SIMPLICITY, followed by current technology, and then price. I want to program the radio with a PC, limit what the keypad does, and just have volume and channel knobs. I want to minimize the possibility of getting lost in the radio by people who don't want to be diddling with the settings while they're driving. In other words, it's got to "look like" an LMR radio. That ruled out the Boofongs and similar cheap Chinese radios, and also the radios that had many buttons and extensive sub-menus.
The TM-281A does this for me. It's also much less than $200, shipped. If you shop around, sometimes significantly less. Now that I have the software and programming cable, adding radios for my son's and daughter's cars are not a big deal. It's also small and can fit in more modern cars, but has a decent internal speaker.
Caveat - the one I have had a motorboating noise in transmit. The cause was RF getting into the microphone. If that happens to you, you can: 1) send it back because it's not supposed to work that way, 2) snap a ferrite core on the cable, or 3) change the mic. Since I wanted simplicity, I pulled the DTMF mic out (we don't use DTMF, it's just more stuff to go wrong) and replaced it with a KMC-27B land mobile radio mic from my TM-6110 6 meter radio. It's a 100% compatible pin-out and a big, beefy mic that reminds me of the real Motorola days (heavy metal radios), but that's NOT the mic that ships with the TM-281A.
The radio also does a nice job of receiving VHF outside of the 2 meter band and is completely narrowband programmable on the 7.5 kHz channel centers (using 2.5 kHz channelization). We use Maxrad 3 dB mobile antennas, and our simplex range is good for our needs if we're out of my repeater's footprint. So, I don't regret buying the TM-281A. I've got other Icom stuff and would have been just as comfortable buying that if it were dumbed down some more for me.
I wish the TM-481A was widely available here for the same price range. I would have preferred to keep everyone on my 440 MSF, but I also have a 2 meter Bridgecom repeater that seems to do better with coverage, but has desense issues that I need to address. At some point, I will be putting in 440 radios, but they will probably be a Motorola digital product, preferably P25, but I might consider DMR if the price is right (I think DMR is okay, but I'm not in love with it like a lot of people seem to be).