I’ve picked up a Kenwood TS-2000 which is a bit expensive but so feature packed that I considered it very much worthwhile. After selling my old pal the IC-735 and my FT-7800 it will only be half price anyway. At least that was my justification.

It doesn’t have the nice wide band receive of the FT-7800R which I used to monitor local public service channels and various other interesting frequencies. I will instead use my handheld VX-6 for this in the future when I get a discone antenna built and put up for that purpose.

It also doesn’t transmit on the 222mhz band but the VX-6 does albeit on very low power, but I can probably rig up an amp for that if I should ever need that. Otherwise I now have receive and transmit abilities on every ham band from 1.8mhz to 440mhz, and 100 watts of power on everything below 222.

After spending only a few hours with the manual I have the rig almost fully mastered, it really is a wonderful work of user interface design. I’ll post a full review after I get some more airtime with this new rig. Meantime, happy hamming.