Meta Morph wrote:
On Fri, 27 Jan 2006 09:48:46 -0500, "W4LM"
wrote:


Discontinued! It is to be replaced by FT2000.


"Meta Morph" wrote in message
news
I noticed Texas Towers removed the listing for the Yaesu Mark V
Field from their web page, and HRO only has demo units available. Is
the Mark V Field discontinued or just temporarily sold out?

-Curious



Well lets hope the new model will be more reliable than the Mark V.
I did not buy one because of all the complaints of both the 100 watt
version and expecially the 200 watt version blowing up and requiring
multiple trips to Yaesu repair.

No tears shed over that loss, eh? I've used a club MV Field a number of
times, and it just didn't impress me. doing simple things required
diving into the manual, heaven help a person if they lose the manual. My
pet peeve was the brightness of the display. It wasn't bright enough, so
I looked in the manual, and after 5 minutes found the menu item to
change the level. Go to it, and find out it is already at the brightest
setting. Really, if they want to design an inadequate display, why offer
the option of making it even dimmer.

But that is just one of many issues. Using that variable speed tuning
doodad in back of the dial was either too slow, or waaaaayyyy too fast.
Did I mention way too many menu items?

The auto tuner seemed to have less range than other radios. It wouldn't
tune an 80 meter dipole across the band while an old IC-765 (now that's
a radio) would easily tune it. Tuning seemed a bit slow in all cases.

Did have a good notch filter, though. Audio filters were okay. I found
myself using only one or two though.

But all in all, it just wasn't much fun to operate. Perhaps all parts
of the reason it has been discontinued


I looked at the Kenwood TS-2000, but it is just too ugly. Multiple
eham.net reports also suggest that it is deaf.

Hard to say. The bad reports weren't too frequent. But you are right -
the radio IS ugly....

As far as the Icom's,
I look at an LCD screen on my computer all day at work. I really
don't want to look at another computer screen when I come home from
work and turn on my ham radio.

Ahhh, but what screens that are! 8^)

73 de Mike KB3EIA -