Category: Equipment

The Kenwood TS-2000 is an all band HF/VHF/UHF transceiver with exceptional features and versatility. Wide band Main HF reception includes: 30 kHz-60 MHz. On VHF/UHF you get 142-152MHz and 420-450MHz. The rig appears menu intensive, but really isn’t and working through the menu is not a huge chore. Many are set and forget. Most needed features are on buttons or knobs, with a number of the buttons accessing a secondary function via the “Function” key.

Receive audio is quite good and pleasant, not at all tiring, while the DSP is very functional and easy to use and can cut out nearby signals fairly well. The filters are adjustable very simply by a quick turn of either the high or low cut knobs on the front panel.

The Superstar 3900 is the modern version of the “old” classic Cobra 148 GTL-DX, also known as the Superstar 360FM. So what’s it like, the good, the bad revealed…

I bought a SS3900 brand new after reading quite a positive review on these radios. Obviously, I’m not expecting the same performance from it that I get from my Kenwood, Icom and Yaesu’s. But how do I rate it? Read on…

For mobile use, I have now exchanged the FT-7900 2M FM radio for a Yaesu FT-857D radio along with an ATAS 120A antenna.

My main reason for installing the 857D into the car is my main interest being the HF bands.

The Icom IC-756 Pro series was the first ham radio transceiver to use 32-bit floating point point DSP.

The heart of the IC-756PROIII is the proven combination of the 32-bit floating point DSP and 24-bit AD/DA converters.

In order to improve the quality of the transmitted audio, I have invested in a reasonably good quality microphone and a few items of audio processing equipment.

Of course, this is my personal shack setup, and other people will have different ideas about what sounds good to them and how to set up their particular choice of equipment.

Good quality audio requires a good quality sound source to begin with. For this purpose, I decided to look into reasonably good quality condenser microphones. My search ended with the Neewer NW 5200.

While searching online for a microphone, I came across the Neewer range which is available under different brand names, and a popular choice with a lot of podcasters are the NW-700 or NW-800 models, and with the sound quality they produce, it’s easy to see why.