After some 25 years of hamming I got my first decent handheld mostly for cross band repeating with my FT8900R, I have become fond of handheld's and if I had the money I would have one of each one out there,
My 1st decent handheld is my TH-F6A Kenwood Tri-Bander for 2, 220, and 70cm, it covers 100Khz to 1.3Ghz all mode receive, as well as dual receive, you can even listen to the same freq in stereo, one nice rig, I use it as a scanner as well, I can listen to the public service on one side while monitoring the Echolink node or a local repeater,
This Christmas was a first ever in my ham life, I actually got a ham related present, Never has anyone in my family ever gotten me anything related to ham radio for a gift, Dear Rosy got me a Yaesu VX2R dual bander for Christmas past and man that is something, you have to see one to appreciate the small size. When I opened the box I thought the radio was the battery. I don't have the exact specs, but it's about the size of a business card, I do recall it's 0.9 inch thick, 1200 memories, many features the F6A doesn't have. It has busy channel lockout which prevents it from transmitting if it senses a signal being received, It will lower the transmit power if the received signal reaches a certain level. This can be deceiving on repeaters, but it works well on simplex. Many power saving features, you can even turn off the receive LED. It doesn't have dual receive, and I have gotten spoiled on dual receive with the F6A and the 8900R, but it does have something similar that helps me get by, it has a dual watch feature, the echolink node is my primary channel, I can go to any other channel and it will check the primary channel every 5 seconds, and if it hears a signal it will go to there primary channel. It has a nice feature for the YL's it's the "panic button" the rig will do one of 3 or 4 combinations of things, send SOS, flash a strobe that's about like a camera flash, of course it goes to hi power and your pre-programmed freq. It would certainly be better than nothing in the event of an assault. I prefer other protection methods more time tested ;-) The battery is 3.6V 1000Mah. There is a rapid charger in the rig, it charges on the wall charger in only 2.5 hours, Batteries America has an off the rig charger for only 24 bucks that allows you to charge without using the rig, highly recommended, Also they have a rapid desk charger for the TH-F6A that really does a super job, on the wall charger the F6A takes a long 5-6 hours to charge, the Battery America charger puts a nice stiff charge on it in only half the time. It sure won't hurt your battery, I am still using the original Kenwood and getting the full charge I was getting when I bought it new
