The Inevitable Happened…
2023 marks 30 years of being a licensed ham and over that time I have owned a range of brands and types of radios, built QRP kits, built antennas… the usual stuff. I started out with a Ten Tec Triton IV, dial cord tuning, and that was a great rig. Excellent receiver, excellent QSK, great company. I ran a TT Scout for mobile HF and that was a fun radio. I liked the simplicity and the analog performance of those radios and can say I started off in ham radio as a “Ten Tec Guy”.
But… I also have a “early adopter” streak, so I also bought an original Icom IC-706, then traded up to a MKII G when it came out. It was like buying a rig from the future! It may have been because the MKIIG is still a very good radio over 25 years later! Icom was ahead of the pack with the size and the feature set. The bleeding edge can be a good corner to hang out on.
Later on my VHF Rover activities gave me a chance to use various Kenwood, Icom and Yaesu radios. They all had pros and cons. They all made plenty of contacts. Over the years I have owned a few of each, but on balance you could call me a “Yaesu Guy”. Yaesu vs Icom reminds me of Nikon vs Canon cameras. Yaesu is more like a Nikon, making great performing gear but holding on to a set of features and specs well past their due date. Icom is to me an equivalent to Canon. Canon always felt a little more flashy, more modern and easier to use, and Nikon was more old-school tried and true. Maybe Ten Tec was my Olympus, because I was a Olympus guy, who eventually became a Nikon guy, who became an Olympus guy again. It’s complicated! Like this analogy.
A few years ago, after a bit of a layoff from ham radio, I had almost no gear left, and some accessories and a few HTs were all I had in my “shack”. I bought a Xiegu G-90 which is a very good radio, and a lot of fun, and it got me back on the air and active again. I also purchased a Yaesu FT-817ND because I have owned several before and I feel kinda “naked” without one. When I decided to get a 100W HF rig a few years back I realized that I needed VHF/UHF as well and the Yaesu FT-991A was the obvious choice. It covered VHF and UHF with some power, has a great receiver, and it has built in audio and and CAT over USB. After buying it I felt like I might have underestimated it. It is a better rig than I expected it to be. I have made loads of contacts with it. It is a 3-band VHF Rover rig, out of the box. I worked SSB, CW, RTTY, FT8, and other digimodes with ease. It’s also an excellent general coverage receiver and I did a lot of SWL with it.
But a funny thing happened when Icom came out with the IC-705. The early adopter in me was back in charge. I bought one soon after it was released and I have been blown away by that radio. It has done everything the 991A has done, and more, with the trade off of less power against less weight. I used it for POTA, travel operation, mobile use, and then as half of my portable LEO satellite station. The 705 has been my downlink rig since I started satellite operation, and it is a joy to operate in that role.
You can see where this is going. Right now Yaesu is making a great line of HF radios, with several new models over the past five years, but the 991A is their only V/U All Mode, and there are no indications of anything new coming any time soon. The 991A is similar to the FT-817/818 in that it is an older design and the clock is ticking. Just this year Yaesu killed off the 817/817 line and Yaesu has not indicated that it will replace that radio. Meanwhile, the IC-705 showed me a better interface, better menus, and in many ways better performance in a very compact package. Certainly it is more convenient than the 991A and a technological leap beyond the Yaesu FT-817/818.
In fact, I like the 705 so much that the 991A started to look like it might need a new owner. Between satellite operation and QRP the 991A wasn’t getting as much use. I never worried about the performance. It performs very well. Even the menu system isn’t that bad. It just isn’t great. And while it is a very good option for satellites like Greencube/IO-117 it isn’t full duplex and there is only one full duplex VHF/UHF All Mode currently in production, and it’s the Yaesu IC-9700. It might seem cliché for a sat op to run one but if you want the best satellite rig you can buy new the list is one rig long.
So it happened… I sold both a backup Yaesu FT-817ND and the FT-991A and am now yet another sat op with a IC-9700! I have some immediate reactions from the first few days of ownership and I will cover them in the next post. Spoiler: Both the 991A and the 9700 are very good radios. They are also very different radios. And that’s a good thing.
petebrunelli 