Kenwood TM-281A

[KF7OQQ]

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I see that this radio is on sale. Is there a down side to this radio having only 25 & 65 watt output option. Will the 25 be too much to hit the 76 repeater in Utah county? I am looking at getting this as my first radio and I know the brand will be good just wondering if there is some bad cons to it here it Utah? Any info will be great.

Thanks

Andy

 

[WB4CS]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.3; en-us; SCH-I535 Build/JSS15J) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30)

I see that this radio is on sale. Is there a down side to this radio having only 25 & 65 watt output option. Will the 25 be too much to hit the 76 repeater in Utah county? I am looking at getting this as my first radio and I know the brand will be good just wondering if there is some bad cons to it here it Utah? Any info will be great.

Thanks

Andy

There's really no such thing as "too much" power. I don't know about your area, but if you're close to the repeater than 25 Watts may be "overkill" when 5 Watts would do it, but nothing wrong with using 25 Watts.

As hams, we're supposed to use the lowest power needed to make contact, but if your radio only does 25 Watts in the lowest setting, that's all you can do

I ran a TM-281A for almost 2 years, it's a damn fine radio. I agree, the 2 power settings are stupid (needs a 5/10 Watt setting) and the lack of a cooling fan was concerning to me. As long as you have the radio mounted where there's good air flow all around the radio, it won't get too hot on 25 Watts. Running it at high power for long periods of time will make the heatsink VERY hot to the touch, but I never had a single issue from running it in high power for long periods of time.

There's also a mod that can be done from the service menu to adjust the power levels. You can actually adjust LOW or HIGH to any power output up to 65 Watts (all the way down to 5 Watts I believe.) Although I'd caution setting it, because it requires opening up the case of the radio, so it's not easily changed if you're driving.