Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Handiham World for 6 January 2010

Welcome to Handiham World!

Pat, WA0TDA, with handiham coffee mug.

This week is a busy one with back to back meetings all day Wednesday and Thursday, so that accounts for this late (and shorter) edition of your weekly Handiham World. I hope you all had a pleasant holiday season and are ready to get back into the routine of getting on the air every day.

I did want to let you know that Santa was good to me this year, because a brand-new Icom IC-7200 was under the tree on Christmas morning. I plan to learn a bit more about the 7200, then I'll write a more thorough review from the our particular Handiham perspective. The best points about the rig so far:

  • Front-firing speaker
  • Easy to use numeric keypad
  • Built-in speech for blind users, no extra module needed
  • USB interface on the back panel
  • Easy to read display
  • Great receiver

So how's that for starters? I'll put together some more detailed thoughts later on, but I have to say that the new IC-7200 is really a step up from the IC-706 Mark 2 G that I had been using for HF. And I'm thrilled that manufacturers are finally including voice frequency readout that doesn't cost extra!

Now, stay tuned for two new year's resolutions. That means you!

For Handiham World, I'm...

Patrick Tice, wa0tda@arrl.net