Tom - KG6SEA - Northern California

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This is my first piece of ham gear - my trusty Icom IC-R5 wideband receiver. It is outfitted with a stubby antenna. I can take this receiver everywhere. It fits nicely in my back pocket. I did a lot of shopping before deciding on the right scanner for me. Being new at this, I want something that can be used at home, and also can be carried around. So I've narrowed the choices down to handheld scanners.

Wideband - The Icom IC-R5 can receive frequencies from shortwave to microwave. So with one radio, I can pick up any frequencies I like to scan. One of the important features I considered was sensitivity. Comparing specs of different handheld scanners and HT's, the IC-R5 has one of the highest sensitivity ratings in all bands. Of course, you get what you pay for, and in the SW band and above 800MHz, the IC-R5 isn't going to compare with dedicated equipment for those bands. It also doesn't have SSB, which would be useful in the SW band. However, it can receive AM, NFM, WFM on all bands, which meets my everyday scanning needs.

Lots of memory - the IC-R5 can store up to 1000 frequencies. It has 20 memory banks to group frequencies together for bank scanning. For example, you can assign air traffic frequencies to bank A, police frequencies to bank P, repeater frequencies to bank R, then just scan the desired bank. Each bank can hold 100 entries. One negative point to the way the IC-R5 memory banks works, is that each memory can only be assigned to one bank. So if you like to put the same frequency to more than one bank, you will need to make a second copy of that frequency, which takes up an extra entry. However, there are 1000 memory entries, so the IC-R5 can hold all the frequencies I need, even though I have to duplicate some of them to be stored in multiple banks. It also has 25 pairs of band edge memories. These memories are used to hold the lower and upper frequencies so you can specify a range of frequencies to scan.

Stealthy antenna - the IC-R5 works great with the Maldol MH-209SMA stubby antenna. I can pick up most of the local repeaters, as well as local FM stations. It is a coiled up 1/4 wave antenna for 2m and 70cm bands, but it can pick up signals from other bands. Two bands which the stubby can't pick up very well are 220MHz and 800MHz. For these bands, TV stations, and for weaker signals, I switch to a 17" long Comet SMA-24. The SMA-24 is 1/4 wave on 2m, and 5/8 wave on 70cm, which really pulls in those weak signals. It is made of thin flexible memory wire, so I can coil it up and put it in my pocket when I need to carry it around.

PC Programming - with 1000 memories, PC programming is essential. Icom offers the OPC478 cable, which costs a small fortune. Fortunately, the schematic of that and similar cables are available on the web. I downloaded a copy from the icomR5 Yahoo Group. It's a simple 2 transistor level converter which fits nicely inside a DB9 shell. It works like a charm with the free tk5 programming software by Bob Parnass AJ9S. This excellent piece of software runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.