The new truck is a Ford F150. New radio is IC-7100 because it supports HF, 50, 144, 440, all modes.
This is the first ICOM radio that I feel like complaining about things...
- Radio reboots on engine stop/start. Like most new vehicles, the engine shuts off at most stops...ok. But, when it starts, the battery voltage drops to a low as 5V for tenth's of a second and the radio reboots. Maxim has a spec on what happens to the bus voltage when cranking...
- https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/4240
- I'm thinking about some sort of bus Voltage hold up to handle this case. Maybe a super capacitor? Seems like it needs FET switches as well, so something like West Mountain Radio PWRgate
- The radio has a variety of programmable steps for FM mode, including 5, 6.25, 10, 12.5, 20, 25, 50, 100 KHz...but where is 15 KHz? So have to set it to 5 KHz and fiddle to find the center.
- I use Chirp for programming radios and RepeaterBook to make lists of repeaters. But Chirp doesn't seem well supported for this radio.
- It doesn't handle the Banks B, C, D, E, although there appears to be some work on that.
- It doesn't seem to know how to program repeater offsets. All the 440 repeaters ended up with 600 kHz offsets and it required manual programming to correct it.
- DV seems interesting, I've listened to some conversations and the mobile flutter is missing.
