Congrats on your new call sign and welcome to HAM radio. I had to laugh when I saw your first post title "What Comes Next?" because it's the never-ending quest to find the best, greatest, radio. And when you do find it and buy it, another comes along and the cycles repeats itself.......
bharvey2, thanks. I've been a scanner user for 35 years. For the last 2 years, a short wave listener. Had an Icom IC-R75 I've since sold to feed my ham radio needs, lol. I've listened on that radio to hams talking all over the world. It's been something I've been wanting to do for the past 10 years or so. As a matter of fact, was going thru my things the other day and found a notebook I used to take notes from studying the radio shack book. I was surprised to find I was studying for the old novice test which I believe was still called, shortly after the morse code requirement was dropped. Since then, I've acquired 2 DMR radios; a Tytera MD380 and a Mororola Xpr4550. I've just sold the Motorola, keeping the Tytera for the time being. I've also purchased a Yaesu Ftm-400XD, because I always thought it would be best to be able to communicate on analog even though the fast growth of DMR. Loving the Yaesu and planning on getting a second one, an FT2D soon. In my short tenure as a listener / ham, I think that DMR is easy to use, as long as you are able to program the radio with the correct info. It's easy to contact with people locally or throughout the world. But, you need to master the programming skill or...have someone give you a code plug, which leaves you at someone's mercy. The Yaesu only requires the normal inputs, repeater frequencies and offsets. Connecting to Wires X is another matter but not that hard to grasp. I like the Fusion system in the sense that you can talk to both analog and digital users and the FTM-400XD, is dual band.
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