Best mobile rig for Dual-Band or Tri-Band + DIGITAL?

[K9KLC]

Almost all repeaters on the 70cm and 2m band are YSF. About half of those are WIRES-X

I guess you mean in your area. I can assure you, that's not the case in my area.

 

[K9KLC]

in light of the above, which is better for me, AT578 or FTM-500DR? Or is there a better, more feature rich alternative I omitted?

Given what you said about the other question I asked if it's mostly all system fusion the 500 or 300 are the obvious answers.

 

[kayn1n32008]

Answers to the questions above to assist in triangulating the best solution:

1.) Almost all repeaters on the 70cm and 2m band are YSF. About half of those are WIRES-X

No, no they are not. Majority of repeaters on 144MHz and 440Mhz are analogue.

Of those that are able to operate a digital mode, it's a healthy mix of Fusion, DMR and DStar. Lagging behind is P25, NXDN.

The club I belong to has, at our primary site, on UHF:
2x DMR
1x P25
1x DStar
1x Fusion
1x Analogue

On VHF:
1x DStar
1x Analogue

Our 3 remote site all each have 1 analogue VHF repeater.

So of 11 repeater our club currently operates, only 1 Fusion repeater and that works out to be 9.1% of our current VHF/UHF infrastructure. This doesn't include modes like Vera, Winlink or APRS as these don't support voice. We lost 2 remote site in recent time that had VHF analogue repeaters, so really, the over all percentage of Fusion gear increased, not because we deployed Fusion, because we decreased our over all about of infrastructure.

To say most VHF and UHF repeaters are Fusion is an outrightly false.

While many clubs jumped on the cheap(garbage) DR-1x repeaters, many were simy drop in replacements for aging repeaters already in ace, and are never used as a digital repeater.

My club did it. The allure of a $500 repeater is really hard to stop. Getting 7 repeaters for the cost of a quality machine was impossible to stop.

Thankfully the club has moved in a better direction, and is replacing the analogue infrastructure with much higher quality equipment, with proper RF plumbing design. No hammy junk antennas, adaptors(almost got them all gone) LMR400 or mobile duplexers.

The club bought 6 or 7 DR-x repeaters when Fusion entered the market, only one has ever supported use of Fusion, any others were strictly analogue.

Long term, we plan to deploy P25, DMR, Fusion and DStar machines to our remote sites to widen the footprint of these digital modes and complement our existing analogue footprint.

In a recent survey, majority(~80%)of the respondent's indicated they either use, or want to use digital voice modes, and that the lack of coverage of digital modes was a problem. All 4 modes had similar popularity, with P25 being the least popular(We added P25 capability just before the survey went out).