Ok, I recently (2 weeks ago) purchased a new ICOM R-20 from Universal radio
and here are my novice opinions:

1) My experience with Universal was top notch to say the least. Everyone I
spoke with was knowledgable and the radio arrived on time. Cannot recommend
them any higher.

2) Physical construction of the radio is excellent (with the exception of
the antenna). Tight fit, great design, good feel with the buttons/knobs.
I've come to expect this with ICOM having owned an R2 and a R10 and I wasn't
dissapointed.

3)Battery life was above average. Manual states around 11 hours of use but
I was getting 12-13 before charging on Rx only and not using the record
function.

4)HF - on par with the R2 and better than the R-10. Able to listen to
amature radio on LSB ~3.925 range with no problem with stock antenna. Also
able to listen to various USB utility freq's as well. Cannot record either
with the "automatic recording" option as the background noise on HF does not
allow the squelch to open.

5)VHF - Above average with the Stock antenna. I compared the Rx of the
radio with both my Pro-43 and my Pro-92. With the same antenna, the pro-93
was first with the Icom 2nd and the Pro-92 third.

6)UHF - Again, with the same antenna, the results were the same as VHF. IMO
the Pro-43 is one of the best scanners ever made from a sensitiviy
standpoint and I can't hold it against the ICOM for not matching it in
performance. The difference was minimal but the Pro-43 was still the
winner.

7) Above 1ghz - no experience and have not yet tried to RX anything above
this freq.

8) Programming - I made the mistake of trying to program this radio like my
R-10 and that was a mistake. AFTER reading the instructions the programming
was not that bad. I hope to buy the software/cable with the next paycheck
but as always, something seems to come up

9)Recording - Man, I don't care if the R-20 sucked in every catagory I would
buy it again for this feature alone. The radio comes with 20 "tracks" and up
to 4 hours programming depending on the level of quality you select
(personally, I found the worst setting to be better than what I was doing
before - placing a "Y" connector off of the headphone jack and running one
end to a tape recorder and the other to a external speaker). You can either
record " on the fly" or can set the radio to record when a signal breaks
squelch. With the exception of HF, this feature works perfectly. While
watching football on Sunday I set the scanner to scan a specific bank of
police freq's with the automatic record set to "on". When the game was
over(about 3 and a half hours) I checked the radio and I had about 25 min.
recorded. In short, I was able to listen to everything transmitted during
that timeframe with no gaps between transmissions. In addition, you can FF
or REV through the digital recording just like a tape player without having
the "lag" a tape produces on startup. Man, if this feature only worked on
HF I would be in Heaven!

10) Dual Watch - Haven't really played with it that much but hope to remedy
that this weekend.

In closing, I paid $500 (US) for this radio and consider the money well
spent. I don't know about you, but that is a bunch of money on this end and
I spent many hours researching what I would buy before I did. I almost got
the AOR but bought the ICOM due to my positive past experiences with the
brand. I hope this information is useful and will update as I have more
time to spend with the radio.

All my best,
KD5LQV
david