It arrived today. Holy crap is this thing
small. First thing i noticed, it is slightly different than the RP-70. You don’t need to do the jumper mod at all. This radio doesn’t need to be opened. You hold the PTT and power on, then cycle through the 5 options consisting of BR, 10M, 12H, CB, and HF. Select what you want, then power cycle the radio. I choose BR as that's the normal 40 cb channels + 41-80 which is perfect for free banding, or listening to the nonsense on 27.425. I’ll be using this as a mobile and didn’t want to be bothered with changing bands. This mode gives me channels 1 - 80 without touching anything other than the channel knob.
The menu is simple with all the basic "set and forget" settings like mic gain, roger beep, NR level, backlight level, etc etc. The buttons on the face serve 2 functions. Tap for the first function, push and hold for the second function. Easy. The smartest thing they did was the “knob”. By default it changes channels. Push once and it adjusts volume. Push it again and it adjusts squelch. Push it once more to go back to channels selector. No menu needed to make those changes. RF gain is also as simple as press the RFG button for 2 seconds and adjust with the “knob”.
Only did brief “on air’ testing with my buddy 20 miles north of me. Barefoot on 38LSB i made the trip at s3-s4 with clean audio. He said it’s not loud, but not quiet either, and had no problem hearing me. He basically said it sounded “stock”, which it is. Stock mic, stock power. He also said it’s dead on frequency. We talked for about 45 minutes and it didn’t drift at all.
On the receive side it’s decent. I heard him fine, but his signal was a tad lower than he normally gives me on my other radios. There are 2 types of NR options. Standard, and AI. The AI NR is 10x better than the standard NR. The standard NR has a slight under water effect to it. Both work well knocking out the white noise though. Bonus: Dedicated NR button on the mic. Easy on, easy off.
The clarifier can be set for rx only, tx only, or both. It defaults to both (which i normally chose). Not really needed for general rag chewing, but handy to go in between channels, or fine tune people. Again, pretty easy. Push the CLA button and use the “knob”.
So far i think these are a steal at $129 for a mini rig with AM/FM/SSB. These do not have echo, ctcss/dcs, or weather band like the AT-5000, but they are also $50 less and a bit smaller in size. I’ll run this as a base station for the rest of the week and report back if i find any oddities or annoyances. I’ll probably toss it on the power meter as well and see what it does as it has 3 power options in the menu.
Edit: Mine did not come branded. The radio and mic are blank. I don’t mind this one bit. I’d rather it be unbranded for the cleaner look.
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