Episode 8: Air Band Transceivers

Marc discusses hand held, air-band transceivers, and has some options about them as well.

I was really hoping to get excited about all the features that exist on the latest and greatest transceivers. Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed. They really haven’t improved much over the years. With the advent of smartphone’s, GPS’s, satellite weather, and products like the iPad, I was thinking that the modern transceiver would have extra bells and whistles. I would have even settled for something that had extended power or range.

Unfortunately, they’ve stagnated. There is no GPS integration, no internet connection, no dynamic frequency mapping… absolutely nothing to get excited about. The modern transceiver could easily have been made 15 years ago. They have frequency/memory positions and the big feature is that text names can be assigned to a frequency… but don’t go over the number of allowed characters! You don’t have many.

Didn’t we live through the same thing with cellphones years ago? I remember running out of memory on my cellphone back in 1995 when I input everyone I knew into the memory. Now days consumers expect their phones to be able to store not only every phone number of everyone they know, but their birthdate, their email addresses, the physical address, and random personal notes about them, not to mention a bunch of other fields. What is it about the scanner/transceiver industry that hasn’t caught up with the times? Memory shouldn’t be an issue. Memory is cheap!

Another feature we should have, is the ability to take a course from a flight plan and have the software figure out all the frequencies we might need for the trip. But, alas… transceivers are not that exciting. You get to transmit, receive, program in the frequencies you think you might need – that’s it.  They’re boring.

All air-band, hand-held transceivers have the ability to scan, transmit with 5 watts of power, and all have a 121.5 emergency button.  Even the battery life is about the same with all of them.  The only real difference is the look and feel. Even that isn’t really all that different.

I own an IC-6. but if I were to buy a new transceiver I’d get the VXA-710 because it has two additional frequency ranges which could be useful for times I am not flying.  I don’t see that loosing 40 positions from memory is really that big of a loss. As I said, the number of memory positions is limited – nothing like what we have in the cellphone market today.

Vertex is very proud of being water resistant to 3′ for 30 minutes.  Where this is good, it’s not a huge selling point.  ICOM does not claim that their transceivers are as water resistant, but honestly… submerge any electronic gizmo, don’t turn it on, and dry it out thoroughly, and it will be fine. ICOM transceivers are okay in the rain.  Mine has gotten wet (from rain) several times, and I never gave it a second thought. The Vertex may be able to go to three feet for a half hour, but I’ve never had any electronic gizmo fail because it got wet, but I’m not one of those people who talk on the cell phone in the restroom.

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