buying a new radio need some help

[kamikaze1]

hi all

ive been having serious intermod and pager tower interference since i put my antenna outdoors
so i looked around and talked to a few hams here and there and read the forum that a comercial radio would help so i searched around and found some radios that i think look good but dont know how
they'll preform whats the pros and cons of these radios will the intermod subside some let me know what you think i should get i cant spend over 200 so keep that in mind thx

-RADIOS-

YAESU FT-270R

ICOM IC-V80 SPORT

ICOM IC-V82

 

[mmckenna]

All three of those are Amateur radios, and will likely suffer from the same inter mod issues as your current set up. It may be possible that one of them may perform better than the others, but the newest amateur radio hand held I own is the FT-170 hand held.

There is a lot to be said for a true commercial radio. They tend to be pretty well built and have better receivers. Cost will be higher and programming can be an issue. A good place to look would be on the used market. Some good Motorola and Kenwood's out there that will work well for you.

Then again, having the ability to program on the fly without a computer is a big bonus, and other than a few commercial radios, front panel programmability is primarily a Ham thing.

 

[N8IAA]

Of the three, the FT270 is built more as a commercial radio than the other two. One thing that will help is that there is an internal squelch accessed via the menu. There are filters made to take out some of the paging interference, but remember, most pagers run in nearly the same band as railroad frequencies.
HTH,
Larry

 

[burner50]

What you need to look for is a monoband radio that does not have extended receive. This means the radio will have a pretty tight front end receiver. Most modern amateur radios have extended receive.

 

[N8IAA]

Ham HT's:
FT-250 and FT-270R: 136-174MHz
IC-V80 and V82: 136-174MHz

Commercial HT's:
Motorola HT-1000: 136-174MHz
Yaesu VX-354: 136-174MHz

Basic ham ht's above are based on commercial radios. The Yaesu's and Icom's. I own a VX-354. It is no different in receive than the Yaesu ht's I've ever owned with the exceptions that it truly does the narrowband steps and transmit requirements by the FCC to be compliant in January, 2013.
The only difference was the HT-1000 I had, the audio blew away all the others.
This is why the Yaesu series of 2m radios have been so popular for railfanning.
HTH,
Larry

 

[haleve]

Cant Beat Commercial Radios

I am into X-TREME scanning which means I use commercial grade radios for service specific monitoring like railroad, marine, civilian aviation & fire service scanning, I always purchase my radios from Red Dog Radios & my antennas from DPD productions, Tom RDR & Dave DPDP are both members here & are extremely helpful in guiding you with your monitoring needs, give them a try.

Red Dog Radios

DPD Productions - Antennas & Accessories for the RF Professional & Radio Hobbyist

 

[ratboy]

Just buy a Yaesu VX-170 or the current model, the VX-270, they work great for rail and for 2M too, of course.

 

[kayn1n32008]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9780; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.600 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

Your other option is adding a notch filter tuned to notch out the offending pager transmitter. Even with a VX-270 you will still probably suffer from adjacent channel noise using an outside antenna.