I have recently purchased an ICOM IC-R7100 scanner/receiver in excellent condition.
Initial checks with my test equipment indicates that it seems to be in good tune-up.
I have previously owned and tested IC-R9000, IC-R8500 and IC-PCR1500.
This IC-R7100 is nice but I have experienced a minor issue during memory scanning.
I know about R7100 having a noise squelch (that works only for FM and AM) and a S-meter squelch (that works in all modes).
I select an USB or LSB memory channel and set the squelch to a level that precisely closes the receiver and then check that RX is still silent when moving to a memory channel with FM and AM mode.
When I start the memory scan the R7100 always stops temporarily when it goes from a memory channel with either AM or FM mode to a channel with either USB or LSB. It does not happen when going from USB/LSB to AM/FM channels. If I do memory switching manually I can trigger squelch opening by doing the same, i.e. going from AM/FM to SSB and not from SSB to AM/FM.
I can see the S-meter jump slightly when going from a memory channel with AM/FM to a memory channel with SSB so I guess it has to something to do when mode switching from AM/FM to SSB.
This issues causes me to set the squelch to a higher level than necessary causing me to miss low level signals during scan.
I have not seen this issue with other ICOM receivers so I guess this is a design issue with the R7100?
I have read through the service manual trying to understand what causes these issues but it is somewhat above my knowledge level... Page 3-8 in the service manual, paragraph 3-1-20 and 3-1-21.
Initial checks with my test equipment indicates that it seems to be in good tune-up.
I have previously owned and tested IC-R9000, IC-R8500 and IC-PCR1500.
This IC-R7100 is nice but I have experienced a minor issue during memory scanning.
I know about R7100 having a noise squelch (that works only for FM and AM) and a S-meter squelch (that works in all modes).
I select an USB or LSB memory channel and set the squelch to a level that precisely closes the receiver and then check that RX is still silent when moving to a memory channel with FM and AM mode.
When I start the memory scan the R7100 always stops temporarily when it goes from a memory channel with either AM or FM mode to a channel with either USB or LSB. It does not happen when going from USB/LSB to AM/FM channels. If I do memory switching manually I can trigger squelch opening by doing the same, i.e. going from AM/FM to SSB and not from SSB to AM/FM.
I can see the S-meter jump slightly when going from a memory channel with AM/FM to a memory channel with SSB so I guess it has to something to do when mode switching from AM/FM to SSB.
This issues causes me to set the squelch to a higher level than necessary causing me to miss low level signals during scan.
I have not seen this issue with other ICOM receivers so I guess this is a design issue with the R7100?
I have read through the service manual trying to understand what causes these issues but it is somewhat above my knowledge level... Page 3-8 in the service manual, paragraph 3-1-20 and 3-1-21.