Icom Incorporated

Um, my go kit is not getting any use, my 850, 700 watt kit, and I want a better receiver in the truck, so it's time to upgrade that to an FT-891 'cause I still want the removable head.

Um, and as, as we are recording this right now, I don't know anything about the Icom X026, whatever they're calling it, uh, what that product looks like.

You know, tonight is the Tokyo Ham Fair as we're recording, so maybe I'll find out a little bit more tomorrow.

Lost all audio connect-

Yeah.

Um, let's see.

The other thing that I noticed is that the, today, the day that we're recording this, is the day that Icom unveiled more details about the X26 radio, which is officially-

Like, literally while we're recording

So for argument's sake, I have built a number of hotspots for the digital modes and with Pi-Star software, and a Pi-Star digital hotspot would cost you approximately about 50 pounds to build.

But your radio, well, you know what the price of a, uh, Yaesu or an Icom rig is.

The cheaper ones are the DMR, but uh, it depends what mode you wanna use.

Now, when it comes to the analog radios- Yeah, you can use a 20 pound, uh, Baofeng from China.

Totally remote your station via this piece of software.

It works with Flex Radio, Icom, Yaesu, Kenwood, and 200 plus other rigs via Hamlib.

Uh, it runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, including Raspberry Pi.

It is C based and GPL3 licensed.

Well worth a trip, and, uh, as I say, a fun, fun day out for everybody.

Last thing I, I did, and this sounds like a, um, a bit of an advert, but for those of us who've got Icom IC9700s, having spoke to...

And I won't say who, 'cause I don't wanna put him into trouble, but one of the, uh, senior Icom guys about it, and I said, "My f- my IC9700 is not, uh, very frequency stable." And he went, "Yeah, that's a feature." [laughs] So yeah, it's a, a bit of a bad design.

Um, there is a modification you can do.

There are various mo- a couple of mods on the internet for, you can do for almost nothing, but then they don't do very much, but if you wanna fix the problem and make it really stable, there's a company called Leo Bodnar, and what you do is you effectively insert a little board inside the radio with a cable to the outside, and you connect up a GPS unit with, um, with a, a little GPS aerial, and that locks the 9700 smack on frequency.

You don't need a soldering iron.

The only thing you will need, if you haven't got it, is some JIS screwdrivers, or a JIS screwdriver, the Japanese Industry Standard.

And the only reason you need that is so you don't damage the heads of the screws you're gonna take out of the Icom rig.