Dayton Spoils!

The Day­ton Hamven­tion was good to me. Specif­i­cally, the Con­test Uni­ver­sity was very, very good to me. I was the lucky recip­i­ent of the Con­test­ing Din­ner Draw­ing Grand Prize: ICOM IC-​7600!

Icom IC-​7600 and it’s mine!

I just can’t believe my good for­tune. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in Con­test Uni­ver­sity was a treat and then this to top it off? Unbelievable!.

Frankly, I have never con­sid­ered any of the Icom rigs sim­ply because they are priced out of my cur­rent bud­get. I have cer­tainly drooled over them – I love the aes­thet­ics of them – and thou­sands of hams swear by the 756 series hav­ing proven as great all-​purpose high per­for­mance rigs. And now I have one sit­ting on my desk. Unbe-​freaking-​lievable!

I have used this in a num­ber of con­test since and find it an awe­some CW trans­ceiver. I have used it a lit­tle bit on SSB and hope­fully can fig­ure out how to setup using N1MM for the up-​coming NAQP SSB con­test. This is also a great AFSK RTTY rig using the inter­nal codec via the USB cable. This is per­haps one of my favorite fea­tures: Rig con­trol AND Audio-​based Dig­i­tal Modes using a sin­gle USB cable. No inter­faces required, my com­puter sim­ply sees the thing as another sound-​card and the MMTTY or DM780 grabs it and viola!

Any com­plaints I have are minor. While SO2V is pos­si­ble with the radio, it lacks a sep­a­rate tun­ing knob so it is very easy to tune off the wrong VFO if you are not focussed (which is often for me.) That writ­ten, I used SO2V to add 33 add’l same-​band QSO dur­ing WPX CW so it DOES work. This is prob­a­bly more a learn­ing curve issue than an ergonomic one. I wished I could vary the vol­ume of the sub-​VFO and assign each VFO audio left and right rather than mix. The dual-​watch fea­ture, along with the scope, is very handy for DXing. I plant the VFO-​B on the DX sta­tion and use VFO-​A to tune to a clear spot in the pile-up…this works exceed­ingly well! While the band­scope is not ter­ri­bly high-​resolution (like a Flex-​Radio 5000) it is tremen­dously use­ful and I don’t know how I man­aged to deal with­out. One wish­list item would be to have an even nar­rower roof­ing fil­ter option. I have not yet heard the receiver get ugly from over­load and inter­mod, nor have I seen the AGC start freak­ing out due to a loud sta­tion out­side of my fil­ter pass­band. Not say­ing it wouldn’t ever do these things, but so far this is a very nice work­ing rig. My last pet peeve is that I wished the poten­tiome­ters were just slightly nicer quality…I am being picky now!

So far the is a keeper. I have not used any of the big­ger Yaesu, Icom, Ele­craft, Flex-​Radio rigs so I can­not com­pare per­for­mance. Some­day I look for­ward to being a guest oper­a­tor dur­ing a con­test to try a IC-​7800 or a K-​3. Until then I am very very con­tent: This is the best radio I have ever used.

Look­ing for­ward to try­ing this soon using FSK so that I can use the dual-​peaking fil­ter for RTTY!