Saturday 6 June 2015

A new (but old) addition

Here is the latest addition to my Shack. As a young shortwave listener in the 1980's I always wanted one of these receivers but back then it was of course well out of my price range. It is the Icom R70
I managed to get an immaculate example of this receiver at a reasonable price and I am very pleased with it. It is a heavy, well built set, it feels far more substantial than the Kenwood receivers I have from the same era.
It is however quite a quirky receiver in some ways. Each time you turn the receiver on it defaults to the same frequency (15mhz in general coverage mode and 7 mhz in HAM mode). In addition you tune in 1 MHZ bands and you must use the UP and DOWN buttons to go to the next Mhz segment. In other words if you are at 7.999 Mhz and keep tuning, rather than go up to 8.000mhz the R70 rolls back down to 7.000mhz. Quite an odd way of doing things. Still as an HF receiver the R70 is excellent and I think this one is a "keeper".

1 comment:

  1. Reminds me of, as a young boy, visiting a local dentist who was an avid ham (you could do those things without anyone fearing a court case back then!) I was amazed by the rig, similar to yours, but rather less impressed by the operator, who really wasn't able to make the hobby appear remotely interesting. Then again, he was a dentist!

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