Way back in the latter part of the 1980’s I met a guy named Bob who worked 3-11’s at a store when I was working 3-11’s on the police department. He lived in the area and we discovered we were both radio nerds. Occasionally I would go to his house after work and we would play radio for hours.
Bob had an Icom R7000 connected to a Grove Scanner Beam on a rotator on the roof of his house. This was my first exposure to Icom receivers and I was fascinated by it. While by then I had several programmable scanners this was the first time I had access to a professional receiver. I was able to hear all kinds of traffic on it that I would never hear on a lowly scanner, mostly because of the antenna he had. I was limited to a little RadioShack 20-176 antenna my girlfriend allowed me to install on the roof of my apartment building, since she was the rental manager I was able to do that.
With that R7000 we would use the various NOAA weather stations around the Midwest as beacons to see if ducting or other conditions favored a specific direction. While Chicago, Milwaukee and a couple other stations were always around, more distant stuff like Rockford, Madison, Indianapolis and Detroit depended on conditions. Once we were able to hear some stations out in the Omaha area booming in and covering closer in stations.
We would put in a weather channel on the R7000 and swing that beam around and see what stations would pop up. The signal strength meter was awesome to watch as the beam rotated. We also put in various VHF high and low band channels and listen to traffic from 150 miles or more away routinely. Occasionally we would put in the input to the local police repeater and swing the beam around to see where the car talking was. While it wouldn’t give us distance we would see if the given locations matched the direction, they occasionally didn’t…
He also introduced me to Military Aircraft monitoring. He had a private pilot’s license so he was interested in aviation in general, but I only had an MX7000 that could hear MilAir freqs around that time and very little knowledge about MilAir. While I knew all about Unicom channels and some of the local tower and ground channels as I flew with my Dad a lot as a kid, he was able to teach me more about what we were hearing.
He also had a real military aviation radio, the brand of which I cannot recall. This was from the 1970’s and had a rather large shelf unit, roughly the size of a milk box (for those old enough to remember those) and a head unit that was about the size of what an SDS200 is today. The cable was really long and coiled up and he needed a special power supply for it. I don’t recall the voltage but 48VDC seems to stick in my memory.
Fast forward a couple of years and my roommate had a friend who was a dispatcher for one of the towns on our suburban network. I knew Matt’s voice but never had met him. He came over once to see my roommate and saw my radios in the apartment. He and I started talking and it turns out he was as much of a scanner nerd that I was and he too had an R7000. He and I became good friends and remain so now.
While there was no way I would be able to afford an R7000 then eventually I was able to get a used one. It was nowhere as near as good as Bob’s or Matt’s, the sensitivity was very poor. I sent it off to EEB in Virginia and they were able to tune it up and perform some of the mods they were well known for at the time.
Around that time I bought a used Kenwood R5000 HF receiver. Until then I had an old wooden cased Zenith TransOceanic from the 1950’s that still worked great after 30 or 40 years as well as a couple other portable shortwave receivers of various makes. This R5000 was my first “real” shortwave radio but I didn’t really use it much. I traded it to a friend for a bunch of Motorola stuff and soon thereafter got my Panasonic RF-4900 that I spoke about in an earlier tale. I really liked that R5000 and regretted trading it away, especially considering the return I got on it (BTW, Ron: Do you still have it?). Some time later I got a Kenwood TS440 after I got my ham license as it was pretty similar to it.
Back to Icoms. I found an R71 that matched my R7000. I pretty much bought it as an aesthetic piece but pretty soon found out it worked pretty well. I really didn’t have the HF bug but occasionally twirled the know around the bands. As a Tech my ham license didn’t allow me voice below 10M so it was more practical for me than the Kenwood TS-440 so I sold that.
Occasionally Matt, Bob and I would take one of our R7000’s to work and connect it to a VHF P-D antenna on top of our 100 foot tower at the police station. If VHF ducting was occurring on the afternoon shift we would do this after work. We would tell the dispatcher that the Car-to-Car channel was out of service at the comm center for the night. As I was in charge of the tech stuff there they just assumed we were fixing something. The R7000 along with a PL decoder was a great combination for discovering new signals and verifying knowns.
At one time I ended up with 2 R71’s and 3 R7000’s at the same time. I lucked into a pair of R7000’s from a surplus shop. They were pretty dirty and neither worked well but they were intact and, after some serious cleaning, actually looked pretty good. I had one of the cases repainted by a metal shop and found a glass shop that made me new glass covers for the displays as both of these were broken. I used the one from my existing radio as a template and had that shop make 4 of them, and kept the other two as spares. I am glad that I did as I broke one a while later and a friend needed one for his radio.
I was able to get a hold of a copy of the R7000 service manual along the way and found that a majority of the alignment procedures could be done with a voltmeter, just tune the radio to a frequency and turn the pot until the proper voltage was displayed on a multimeter. After that the radios worked almost as good as new.
So for a year or two I had 5 big Icom radios, they looked great all lined up in a row! By then I was married and my wife was happy I spent money on radios rather than booze and other women so she put up with it. I wish I took more pictures back then! It was then that I discovered rack-mounting and had a CentraCom-II bay or two. I had NovexCom racks for a couple of these, the first time (of many) that I would buy from them.
I eventually sold or traded the R700’s and R71’s off and ended up with an R8500. I did have an R7100 for a very short time but was not really impressed so I think that went in trade for my first R8500 or perhaps some other radio. I don’t think I ever had an R75 but I knew a couple guys who did.
The R8500 was, to me at least, an ideal receiver. It combined all the capabilities of the R7000 and R71 into a single package. I loved the display, at least until the lights started to fail. I ended up trading my first to a friend out East (you know who you are!) and eventually I ended up with another (or was it the same one?) later. Either way, it worked fine until I moved to Arizona but apparently something shifted in the moving truck and when it arrived here it had some issues. I sent it to Icom repair and they fixed it but a week or two later the announced that R8500’s would no longer be repaired by them due to lack of certain parts. I am pretty sure mine was the last one repaired by Icom’s Service Center.
The R8500 used a series of small incandescent bulbs for the display light. These tended to go out from time to time and were kind of a pain to replace. There were something like 6 or 8 bulbs wired all in parallel running off the 12VDC line. To replace a bulb you had to remove the covers, remove the screws that held the front panel on to the chassis and rotate it in order to access these bulbs. If you didn’t have an exact replacement then part of the display would be brighter or dimmer than the rest. Someone posted on the RadioReference forum about using colored LED’s to replace the incandescent bulbs, they would be more reliable and you could choose the color you wanted.
I went on Amazon and found a set of 10 each of several color 12VDC LED’s. These had a limiting resistor in line with each LED so they would work properly on 12VDC. I first did it with red LED’s, then yellow but wasn’t really happy with either. I did find after changing the colors out that I could wire the LED’s together outside the radio and then install the LED’s in a group connected to a single solder pad, this was a lot easier than installing each individual LED on it’s own pads. A little dab of Elmer’s glue would hold the LED into the hole.
The first batch of LED’s didn’t last long, they got dim in a few months so I bought a new batch from a different seller. These were much better and included green LED’s. I tried these and they looked awesome so the R8500 lived on with these for several years before I sold it off.
More recently I bought an R8600, which I still have. A friend of mine had had one a couple of times and I almost bought his each time he sold it but never pulled the trigger. I eventually saved up enough and got a brand new one (My first brand new Icom ever!) at HRO’s booth at Hamvention a couple years ago. Since then I have totally re-equipped my ham gear at home with mostly Icom stuff, all bought new from HRO, DXE or GigiParts. This includes an R7300, an IC-705 and most recently an R7100.
During the years I have had a wide variety of (mostly) Icom ham rigs. I used them mostly for HF listening as I was only a Tech until about 6 years ago when I upgraded to a General license. Over the years I had had at least 2 IC-735’s, an IC-725, an IC-726 and at least 2 IC-746Pro’s. I also had an IC706 for the car and more recently a pair of IC-7000’s, one in the car and another in the house. The 735’s were my favorite. They were nice receivers and easy to use. We would set one up with a deep-cycle marine battery and a 165-foot dipole antenna at a local forest preserve and operate on Field Day or even just for the fun of it.
There is a great story involving this setup: The first time we did this was at a CARMA (scanner club) picnic in Shoe Factory Woods near Schaumburg (suburban Chicagoland). We arrived well before dawn to set up. We strung up that wire dipole tied to a couple trees. We tied the ends to a softball and used that to get it over the branches. We connected this to an MFJ-949 tuner and then connected to the radio. It worked great. What we didn’t know was that that day was also Field Day, so we were pleasantly surprised at the hundreds of contacts we made once we figured that out.
There was a dark side to this however. What we didn’t know was that we had strung the wire antenna up over a bridal path. We discovered this when we heard “clop, clop, clop, Whoa! What the…” We almost decapitated a horse rider. He was not too happy. While we were quick to relocate that end of the antenna he did file a complaint and we got a visit from the Rangers. We had a permit for the picnic and made apologies, even invited the equestrians to join us for lunch later and all was forgiven.
Back to the Icom; That little 735 got the job done that day. We made hundreds of contacts with a dozen or more ham licensees and had a blast. We also had my R7000 set up at the time with a discone antenna on about 50 feet or so of plastic pipe mast set up on a tripod. Due to the high ground of the picnic grounds that received a ton of stuff. I plan on another Scanner Tale all about CARMA Picnics, we had a lot of fun with these over the years.
For 40 years now I have always had at least one Icom receiver and my current ham is centered around Icoms. I also dabbled in other makes, like the Kenwood I mentioned earlier. For a few months I had an AOR DV1 here. I was asked to evaluate it for Scanner Master and do a writeup on it. Usually I get to keep a radio I do that for but not that DV1. The boss wanted it back as it was expensive and he wanted to have it for himself. I did enjoy it and it was pretty useful but all in all I still prefer the Icom. Should I come across another DV1 for a great price I might splurge but that is a lot of money for something that would likely be more of a dust collector. I really don’t need my R8600 either but I would not get rid of it (hear that Scott?).
I also had a couple AOR AR8000's, these were great paired with an Opto Scout back before scanners had CloseCall and Spectrum Sweeper. I also had a couple other lesser AOR handhelds like an AR1000 and an AR900. The AR800's were great radios alone as well and I had a lot of fun with them but I was less impressed by the others. I also played with a couple of their desktop rigs but never owned one. A friend has an AOR Alpha and a AR5000 and another guy I knew had an AR3000. All of these I played with but never was impressed enough to buy them. My buddy Ted had a FRG9600 or 8800 years ago and loved it but I never really was enthused by it.
I know this story is about the big desktop Icom’s but I suppose I should mention the handhelds. I currently have a pair of R5’s that are great for railfanning. They are tiny, have great receivers and decent audio. They last forever on a pair of AA’s. I have over the years had a smattering of other Icom handhelds, most notably an R3. This had a tunable TV receiver built in it. This was really cool as at the time little RF wireless cameras were all the rage then. I found dozens around town, including one set up at a bank ATM by someone not connected with the bank. The assumption was that they were watching for a pattern by the armored car company that serviced them. We checked around other ATM’s and staked out this one but never found any other cameras nor the person who set up this one.
I also had an R2 for a while and a friend loaned me his R10. I really liked the R10 and almost bought one but had other priorities at the time. I would love to get ahold of an R30 one of these days.
Bob had an Icom R7000 connected to a Grove Scanner Beam on a rotator on the roof of his house. This was my first exposure to Icom receivers and I was fascinated by it. While by then I had several programmable scanners this was the first time I had access to a professional receiver. I was able to hear all kinds of traffic on it that I would never hear on a lowly scanner, mostly because of the antenna he had. I was limited to a little RadioShack 20-176 antenna my girlfriend allowed me to install on the roof of my apartment building, since she was the rental manager I was able to do that.
With that R7000 we would use the various NOAA weather stations around the Midwest as beacons to see if ducting or other conditions favored a specific direction. While Chicago, Milwaukee and a couple other stations were always around, more distant stuff like Rockford, Madison, Indianapolis and Detroit depended on conditions. Once we were able to hear some stations out in the Omaha area booming in and covering closer in stations.
We would put in a weather channel on the R7000 and swing that beam around and see what stations would pop up. The signal strength meter was awesome to watch as the beam rotated. We also put in various VHF high and low band channels and listen to traffic from 150 miles or more away routinely. Occasionally we would put in the input to the local police repeater and swing the beam around to see where the car talking was. While it wouldn’t give us distance we would see if the given locations matched the direction, they occasionally didn’t…
He also introduced me to Military Aircraft monitoring. He had a private pilot’s license so he was interested in aviation in general, but I only had an MX7000 that could hear MilAir freqs around that time and very little knowledge about MilAir. While I knew all about Unicom channels and some of the local tower and ground channels as I flew with my Dad a lot as a kid, he was able to teach me more about what we were hearing.
He also had a real military aviation radio, the brand of which I cannot recall. This was from the 1970’s and had a rather large shelf unit, roughly the size of a milk box (for those old enough to remember those) and a head unit that was about the size of what an SDS200 is today. The cable was really long and coiled up and he needed a special power supply for it. I don’t recall the voltage but 48VDC seems to stick in my memory.
Fast forward a couple of years and my roommate had a friend who was a dispatcher for one of the towns on our suburban network. I knew Matt’s voice but never had met him. He came over once to see my roommate and saw my radios in the apartment. He and I started talking and it turns out he was as much of a scanner nerd that I was and he too had an R7000. He and I became good friends and remain so now.
While there was no way I would be able to afford an R7000 then eventually I was able to get a used one. It was nowhere as near as good as Bob’s or Matt’s, the sensitivity was very poor. I sent it off to EEB in Virginia and they were able to tune it up and perform some of the mods they were well known for at the time.
Around that time I bought a used Kenwood R5000 HF receiver. Until then I had an old wooden cased Zenith TransOceanic from the 1950’s that still worked great after 30 or 40 years as well as a couple other portable shortwave receivers of various makes. This R5000 was my first “real” shortwave radio but I didn’t really use it much. I traded it to a friend for a bunch of Motorola stuff and soon thereafter got my Panasonic RF-4900 that I spoke about in an earlier tale. I really liked that R5000 and regretted trading it away, especially considering the return I got on it (BTW, Ron: Do you still have it?). Some time later I got a Kenwood TS440 after I got my ham license as it was pretty similar to it.
Back to Icoms. I found an R71 that matched my R7000. I pretty much bought it as an aesthetic piece but pretty soon found out it worked pretty well. I really didn’t have the HF bug but occasionally twirled the know around the bands. As a Tech my ham license didn’t allow me voice below 10M so it was more practical for me than the Kenwood TS-440 so I sold that.
Occasionally Matt, Bob and I would take one of our R7000’s to work and connect it to a VHF P-D antenna on top of our 100 foot tower at the police station. If VHF ducting was occurring on the afternoon shift we would do this after work. We would tell the dispatcher that the Car-to-Car channel was out of service at the comm center for the night. As I was in charge of the tech stuff there they just assumed we were fixing something. The R7000 along with a PL decoder was a great combination for discovering new signals and verifying knowns.
At one time I ended up with 2 R71’s and 3 R7000’s at the same time. I lucked into a pair of R7000’s from a surplus shop. They were pretty dirty and neither worked well but they were intact and, after some serious cleaning, actually looked pretty good. I had one of the cases repainted by a metal shop and found a glass shop that made me new glass covers for the displays as both of these were broken. I used the one from my existing radio as a template and had that shop make 4 of them, and kept the other two as spares. I am glad that I did as I broke one a while later and a friend needed one for his radio.
I was able to get a hold of a copy of the R7000 service manual along the way and found that a majority of the alignment procedures could be done with a voltmeter, just tune the radio to a frequency and turn the pot until the proper voltage was displayed on a multimeter. After that the radios worked almost as good as new.
So for a year or two I had 5 big Icom radios, they looked great all lined up in a row! By then I was married and my wife was happy I spent money on radios rather than booze and other women so she put up with it. I wish I took more pictures back then! It was then that I discovered rack-mounting and had a CentraCom-II bay or two. I had NovexCom racks for a couple of these, the first time (of many) that I would buy from them.
I eventually sold or traded the R700’s and R71’s off and ended up with an R8500. I did have an R7100 for a very short time but was not really impressed so I think that went in trade for my first R8500 or perhaps some other radio. I don’t think I ever had an R75 but I knew a couple guys who did.
The R8500 was, to me at least, an ideal receiver. It combined all the capabilities of the R7000 and R71 into a single package. I loved the display, at least until the lights started to fail. I ended up trading my first to a friend out East (you know who you are!) and eventually I ended up with another (or was it the same one?) later. Either way, it worked fine until I moved to Arizona but apparently something shifted in the moving truck and when it arrived here it had some issues. I sent it to Icom repair and they fixed it but a week or two later the announced that R8500’s would no longer be repaired by them due to lack of certain parts. I am pretty sure mine was the last one repaired by Icom’s Service Center.
The R8500 used a series of small incandescent bulbs for the display light. These tended to go out from time to time and were kind of a pain to replace. There were something like 6 or 8 bulbs wired all in parallel running off the 12VDC line. To replace a bulb you had to remove the covers, remove the screws that held the front panel on to the chassis and rotate it in order to access these bulbs. If you didn’t have an exact replacement then part of the display would be brighter or dimmer than the rest. Someone posted on the RadioReference forum about using colored LED’s to replace the incandescent bulbs, they would be more reliable and you could choose the color you wanted.
I went on Amazon and found a set of 10 each of several color 12VDC LED’s. These had a limiting resistor in line with each LED so they would work properly on 12VDC. I first did it with red LED’s, then yellow but wasn’t really happy with either. I did find after changing the colors out that I could wire the LED’s together outside the radio and then install the LED’s in a group connected to a single solder pad, this was a lot easier than installing each individual LED on it’s own pads. A little dab of Elmer’s glue would hold the LED into the hole.
The first batch of LED’s didn’t last long, they got dim in a few months so I bought a new batch from a different seller. These were much better and included green LED’s. I tried these and they looked awesome so the R8500 lived on with these for several years before I sold it off.
More recently I bought an R8600, which I still have. A friend of mine had had one a couple of times and I almost bought his each time he sold it but never pulled the trigger. I eventually saved up enough and got a brand new one (My first brand new Icom ever!) at HRO’s booth at Hamvention a couple years ago. Since then I have totally re-equipped my ham gear at home with mostly Icom stuff, all bought new from HRO, DXE or GigiParts. This includes an R7300, an IC-705 and most recently an R7100.
During the years I have had a wide variety of (mostly) Icom ham rigs. I used them mostly for HF listening as I was only a Tech until about 6 years ago when I upgraded to a General license. Over the years I had had at least 2 IC-735’s, an IC-725, an IC-726 and at least 2 IC-746Pro’s. I also had an IC706 for the car and more recently a pair of IC-7000’s, one in the car and another in the house. The 735’s were my favorite. They were nice receivers and easy to use. We would set one up with a deep-cycle marine battery and a 165-foot dipole antenna at a local forest preserve and operate on Field Day or even just for the fun of it.
There is a great story involving this setup: The first time we did this was at a CARMA (scanner club) picnic in Shoe Factory Woods near Schaumburg (suburban Chicagoland). We arrived well before dawn to set up. We strung up that wire dipole tied to a couple trees. We tied the ends to a softball and used that to get it over the branches. We connected this to an MFJ-949 tuner and then connected to the radio. It worked great. What we didn’t know was that that day was also Field Day, so we were pleasantly surprised at the hundreds of contacts we made once we figured that out.
There was a dark side to this however. What we didn’t know was that we had strung the wire antenna up over a bridal path. We discovered this when we heard “clop, clop, clop, Whoa! What the…” We almost decapitated a horse rider. He was not too happy. While we were quick to relocate that end of the antenna he did file a complaint and we got a visit from the Rangers. We had a permit for the picnic and made apologies, even invited the equestrians to join us for lunch later and all was forgiven.
Back to the Icom; That little 735 got the job done that day. We made hundreds of contacts with a dozen or more ham licensees and had a blast. We also had my R7000 set up at the time with a discone antenna on about 50 feet or so of plastic pipe mast set up on a tripod. Due to the high ground of the picnic grounds that received a ton of stuff. I plan on another Scanner Tale all about CARMA Picnics, we had a lot of fun with these over the years.
For 40 years now I have always had at least one Icom receiver and my current ham is centered around Icoms. I also dabbled in other makes, like the Kenwood I mentioned earlier. For a few months I had an AOR DV1 here. I was asked to evaluate it for Scanner Master and do a writeup on it. Usually I get to keep a radio I do that for but not that DV1. The boss wanted it back as it was expensive and he wanted to have it for himself. I did enjoy it and it was pretty useful but all in all I still prefer the Icom. Should I come across another DV1 for a great price I might splurge but that is a lot of money for something that would likely be more of a dust collector. I really don’t need my R8600 either but I would not get rid of it (hear that Scott?).
I also had a couple AOR AR8000's, these were great paired with an Opto Scout back before scanners had CloseCall and Spectrum Sweeper. I also had a couple other lesser AOR handhelds like an AR1000 and an AR900. The AR800's were great radios alone as well and I had a lot of fun with them but I was less impressed by the others. I also played with a couple of their desktop rigs but never owned one. A friend has an AOR Alpha and a AR5000 and another guy I knew had an AR3000. All of these I played with but never was impressed enough to buy them. My buddy Ted had a FRG9600 or 8800 years ago and loved it but I never really was enthused by it.
I know this story is about the big desktop Icom’s but I suppose I should mention the handhelds. I currently have a pair of R5’s that are great for railfanning. They are tiny, have great receivers and decent audio. They last forever on a pair of AA’s. I have over the years had a smattering of other Icom handhelds, most notably an R3. This had a tunable TV receiver built in it. This was really cool as at the time little RF wireless cameras were all the rage then. I found dozens around town, including one set up at a bank ATM by someone not connected with the bank. The assumption was that they were watching for a pattern by the armored car company that serviced them. We checked around other ATM’s and staked out this one but never found any other cameras nor the person who set up this one.
I also had an R2 for a while and a friend loaned me his R10. I really liked the R10 and almost bought one but had other priorities at the time. I would love to get ahold of an R30 one of these days.
