ale.cx

Summary
• Nice solid radio. Plastic is quite shiny, fit and finish is pretty good
• Pros: Cheap, good receive sensitivity, packed with gimmicks and features
• Cons: Some annoying little quirks, access to squelch control is long-winded, 2ch/sec scan speed

Notes and Whinges
- Squelch opening exits the menu. This is the most irritating aspect of this radio - if you're in menu mode and the squelch goes from closed to open, it exits you from the menu. If this is a 'feature', it would be nice if it could be disabled!
- Slow access to squelch. Involves pressing menu, 2, menu, up or down to adjust it, menu, exit [minimum 6 presses] to adjust the squelch. And to think, there are two buttons below the PTT that could easily be repurposed to do squelch up/down!
- Pager intermod on FM broadcast band receiver.
- SMA socket is on the radio not the antenna, which is the wrong way round to my mind, and necessitates using adaptors if you want to use normal SMA antennae.
- Good solid construction with aluminium chassis
- Hold 'MENU' whilst powering on to change between VFO and MR mode. I can find no reference to this in the manual.
- Editing channel names is a confusing and tedious process, and IME doesn't work very well in VFO mode. If you can get hold of the software and a programming cable, make use of it! It has a large alphabet of characters, but if you use anything other than 0-9 A-Z or ? + -, it will put blanks in.
- Whilst scanning in MR mode, the channel number indicator and the channel name get out of sync!
- It would be nice if the A/B lights at the top were different colours, then you could tell from a distance which channel was breaking the squelch