Universal came through for me in the end and I should acknowledge that.
They red-labled my new radio after my last complaint and it's arrived
an in perfect condition.

On the con side, it took some prodding to get Universal to wake up.
On the pro side, they made good on the whole issue and never once tried
to make it "my problem" (something I had been dreading).

In fact, they went beyond that by giving me gratis some accessories
that I had ordered for the VX-7R. Universal has a problem to be sure
and that's that it can't seem to ship product within anything that
someone would consider a normal timeframe for in-stock items (seven
days to get something shipped out the door that was sitting on a shelf
in the adjacent room?).

But they do appear to be conscious about their image and their
reputation. As long as I squawked loud enough, they bent over
backwards to make things "right." But I would have been just as happy,
more so in fact, to have not had to squawk in the first place than to
get freebies to make up for the hassles.

Bottom line: I'll keep ordering from Universal and will recommend them
to others but with the only caveat being that, for reasons that are
unclear to me, they have a hard time actually shipping items with any
speed whatsoever. I hope they can clean that up because it's the only
smudge on an otherwise very good experience.

greg