Over the last few years I have had many radios in the shack, some of the were only there for a short while, some only for evaluation and some I only tested after fixing them for someone else.

I took all the radios that spend a lot of time in my shack and were used a lot and compiled some statistics on failure rates. All the radios I use for the list were in the shack for at least 2 years and they were all used in at least 2 contests so the contacts on them were all in the thousands. I only counted failures that stopped the radio from being usable, not little things like sticky controls etc. I also only looked at relatively modern radios, no radios older than 10 years were considered.

Here are my findings:

Manufacturer            Number of radios used        Number of failures        % Failures

Yaesu                                                        6                                                3                                  50%

Kenwood                                                   5                                                1                                  20%

Icom                                                          5                                                0                                   0%

Is there a pattern here somewhere?, I know the actual number of radios are to low to conform to normal statistical analysis standards but I do believe it is high enough to give some meaningful and interesting result. I must admit on the basis of the above and the fact that I have been getting NO support from Yaesu Japan, I have decided to think twice before buying any Yaesu equipment, what do you think?. Am I just lucky with Icom ?. I have had one little, non fatal problem with Icom but it was sorted out quickly and the radio was still usable.