I haven’t been that into ham radio since moving out of Salem. I knew folks in Salem. The further away I move, the lower the percentage of people on the radio I actually know. In addition… my involvement/usage declined quite a bit after getting married. Funny how that happens when you actually have someone to talk to (as opposed to when you don’t).
A couple of months ago I sold one of my two mobile radios and my HT to help offset the cost of the new PC that I built. This left me with one mobile radio, which I was using at home as a base. Since I use this radio with an indoor antenna, I don’t go above low power (5 watts). But that’s no problem because I can hit all the local repeaters with that just fine.
The HT I sold was a Kenwood TH-F6A. Widely held (at one time) to be the best HT out there. It’s a tri-band radio that will transmit with a full 5 watts on 220. It has dual-receive and all sorts of nice things. I never liked it. The main reason was the lack of a physical squelch adjustment, and an inconveniently located volume control. To me, those two things totally deserve their own physical controls that are easy to manipulate.
After selling these two radios, it wasn’t too long before I was kinda longing for a Yaesu FT-60R HT. I’ve had one of those before and really liked it. And it has nicely-placed squelch and volume controls. It’s also very well-built.
So a couple of days ago I did it. I bought the FT-60R along with a number of accessories. I’ve always had spare batteries and quick-chargers for every HT that I’ve had. So I wanted to do that again. But this time instead of going with cheap knock-off accessories, I went with the name-brand Yaesu battery and quick-charger. Add to that a factory Yaesu speaker-mic, a Diamond after-market antenna, and an antenna pigtail/adapter so that I can use the HT with standard external antennas.
After this purchase I started thinking that, dang, I like Yaesu products! Maybe I should sell my ICOM IC-208H base rig and replace it with a Yaesu too! However I also started thinking that, dang, that new Yaesu HT was spendy. My poor allowance is going to be in the hole for awhile on that one.
That’s when I made the decision to sell my ICOM base rig and use the new Yaesu HT for both base and mobile. No replacement necessary. I already have two really good mag-mount antennas. One for use at home and one to use in the car.
One really nice aspect to using an HT and a mag-mount for mobile use is… no installation. Slap it on and go! No issue with where to get power. No issue with where to mount the antenna. Perfect! Of course I won’t be able to work weak repeaters with that mobile setup. But it seems to me that the benefits are totally worth that tradeoff.