Sunday, June 3, 2018

Experience with IC-7100

The Yaesu FT-897 is getting a bit tired after many years in the vehicle going through temperature cycles.  But, it doesn't owe me anything and will probably go onto Ebay with a list of its quirks.

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
Figure 2. Typical vehicle cold crank voltage shape.
  • 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.

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