Hi. I am about to buy a Yaesu FT 60. Does anyone have one and could tell me if its a good radio or not.
I had one for a few years, but sold it last fall and went back to using my FT-50. The FT-60 is a good radio with lots of features, but the FT-50 is an old friend that know inside and out.
A 5-watt handheld is a 5-watt handheld, so there isn't much to say about output power with any of them. The quality of the antenna makes more difference than output power.
The FT-60 does have something like 1000 memories, so it gets real confusing to keep track of how you have it programmed. One nice feature of the memory management is the bank structure. You have 10 banks and any of the 1000 memories can be members of any of the 10 banks. Accessing the banks was not intuitive to me, though.
I highly recommend using a computer to program the radio. The ADMS programs from RT Systems are OK, though there are few others out there. If you have the programming cable for any of the late-model Yaesus that have the single-pin four-conductor speaker-mic connector, it should work on the FT-60.
The clip on the bottom of the radio that holds the battery pack is a little cheesy, in my opinion. It takes strong thumbnails or a quarter to unlock the clip. The battery pack needs to carefully aligned and seated so you can get the clip locked back in place.
There is no carrying case available from Yaesu for the radio, though there are cases for other radios that fit. The standard belt clip is a sturdy pager-style spring clip.
There are a couple of Yahoo groups for the FT-60. The guys in the groups can help you with specific questions.