R7000.2

              EXAMINING THE ICOM IC-R7000 RECEIVER

                        Bob Parnass, AJ9S

     The long awaited ICOM R7000 is here.  I bought my R7000
     (S/N  001400)  on  June  14, 1986 from Spectronics, and
     agree with other R7000 owners: ICOM did their  homework
     on this radio.

     I had several questions about the R7000 that  were  not
     answered  in  ICOM's  advertisements, and could only be
     answered by fiddling with the real thing:

       1.  Can one set the R7000 to behave like  a  "normal"
           scanner,  waiting  for a transmission to complete
           before resuming the scan?  Contrary to the review
           in  July  Monitoring  Times,  the  answer is YES.
           There are 4 choices of when  to  resume  scanning
           (or seaching), and this is one of them.

       2.  Does the R7000 have a "search  and  store"  mode,
           like  the  old  Bearcat  250?  Yes, and it's well
           done.  There is a mode which will search  between
           two  frequency  limits, and store the active fre-
           quencies in the top 20 channels.   The  R7000  is
           smart enough not to store duplicate frequencies.

       3.  Does the R7000 use  the  concept  of  a  "channel
           bank"?   Yes,  one can select and deselect any of
           the 99 channels to be in a bank.   This  is  much
           more  flexible  than  traditional  scanners.  For
           example, the user can form  a  bank  composed  of
           channels 2, 5, 31, 48, and 79.

       4.  Does the Priority Scan feature work like a  Bear-
           cat  scanner?   Well,  sort  of.  The best way to
           describe the ICOM R7000 priority algorithm is  to
           say  is  resembles using a Bearcat scanner in the
           manual mode with the priority  feature  selected.
           One  cannot  "scan"  more than one channel on the
           7000 while sampling the priority channel.  On the
           plus side, the priority frequency does not use up
           any of the 99 channels, but  is  programmed  from
           the  keyboard and has its own register.  The user
           can use the "scan speed" control to set how often
           the  priority frequency is sampled, a nice touch.
           In practice, the R7000  dwells  on  the  priority
           frequency  for  a  little  too  long, essentially
           chopping up the signal on the non  priority  fre-
           quency too much.
CONT IN R7000.3