This wasn’t a purchase that I was planning on making, and honestly there weren’t many great deals from Icom, but I’d been considering taking a step up from the Yaesu FT-818 for portable ops, and driving Transverters in the rover for while. I don’t really harbor a particular brand loyalty or preference when it comes to HF radios, so making a jump from Yaesu to Icom for portable ops wasn’t really a thought.
What I told myself initially was that if anyone had one in stock and I could take it home with me that day I’d buy it. I went over to HRO on Saturday afternoon with the intent of buying one and they were sold out. Saturday night at the Contest Dinner, my grandfather won a $50 DX Engineering gift certificate that he handed right to me knowing I was going to buy one at some point, so on Sunday just before we left the hamfest I went over to DXE with the intention of just ordering one and having it shipped home… oddly enough, DXE actually brought inventory of more than just shirts with them, and I had a radio in my hands to putter with on the ride home!
The radio itself functions just like any other Icom radio, I was able to navigate the menus without ever opening the manual as it’s the same as the ID-5100 was for the most part – while the layout is slightly different just due to the functions of the radio, in reality the 705 has a lot more in a smaller package, there is little variation on where individual items are located. My chief complaint so far is that it will not support a memory card larger than 32gb – I’ve had 64gb cards in my ID-51, Kenwood D-74, and my Yaesu FT-5 and FTM-400 now for years. Usually while it doesn’t support it on paper, it’ll still work, in the 705 it won’t even read the card. One aspect that I do really like is that the batteries are interchangeable, and are the same battery packs as the ID-51 and ID-52, so I already have extra battery packs for it on top of Bioenno battery.
One of the only aspects of the interface that took me a few minutes to figure out was switching from VFO to Memory Mode, instead of having a touchscreen button in the bottom menu options, or a physical button on the bottom of the screen, you have to tap the area of the screen in the centre right that states VFO or Memo. I actually really like this, it’s just a small deviation from what Icom traditionally does on their radios and it took me a bit of puttering around to find. Then again, if I’d bought a 7300 over the FT-710, I probably would’ve known this already.
Why do I need this? That’s the question I was asking myself when I started considering this. What does the 705 offer me that the FT-818 doesn’t? Well, for starters I don’t… this is merely a ‘nice to have’ – I think it’ll fit better in my current layout, but the real reason why I wanted to go this way is blatantly obvious, a waterfall display – when it comes to microwaves and just weak signal work in general, having this option can be a game changer in identifying where a signal is on the band.
I’m a ‘buttons and knobs’ guy when it comes to radios, I want a radio to be a standalone device, and be operable without a separate PC being necessary – it’s kind of a running joke with more than a few people that the youngest guy in most of the groups won’t consider some of the newest SDR’s, and frequently uses a tube radio at home. But, after picking up the FT-710 almost a year ago now and running it at home for a while, I do see the benefit of that waterfall display, and I think having that at my fingertips while running the upper UHF and Microwave bands in the VHF contests will be a very nice thing to have. I won’t be buying a Flex anytime soon, but maybe I’ll appreciate some of the advantages when they come along.
The trick now? Interfacing everything in a nice way. This is something I actually have never done, I usually am moving BNC jumpers all over the place, and while I picked up a couple more just to make sure that I wasn’t sharing any between transverters, I wish I’d sat down and made a list before Dayton. I’m realizing now what I really need to do to make things easier on those upper bands, and getting some additional switching to flip between transverters, especially the RF sensing ones would’ve been the best thing I could have started with.
With two weeks before the June VHF Contest (at the time of writing), I really should sit down over the Holiday weekend, take an inventory of what I have, sketch out how I want to layout the station, and see where to go from here.
Roving On 