ADONIS AM-708E

A VERSATILE MIC?

The Adonis AM-708E Desk Mic is a handsome beast and promises to bring great improvements in the quality of transmitted audio with the convenience of radio-switching! So let's have a look...

The Adonis comes with no cable to attach to your radio so you have to order separately. I have one for Alinco, Yaesu and Icom. That should permit me to use the microphone on my Flex-3000, Icom-7100, Yaesu-FTM400, Alinco-DR735 and more recently my FT-891.

The mic has a switch to allow you to hot-swap from Radio-A to Radio-B, so connecting to a third radio will require swapping over a lead physically. Most of the time I would only want to swap between two radios anyway, but the third lead is there just in case. Chances are, the mic will be used mainly with the Flex and the Icom.

The meter on the base displays battery power and the output level. There are two fixed levels of compression available courtesy of a switch (Hi/Lo) and also a Variable setting courtesy of a rotary knob. In manual mode, it's your responsibility of course to remember not to go beyond 0db by keeping your eye on the level meter.

There's also an "Audio Quality" selector switch to optimise the output for either FM or SSB.

Finally, there's a couple of buttons labelled "Up/Down" to allow you to quickly change the frequency/channel. Oh, and of course the PPT and LOCK buttons! A built-in timeout feature makes sure you don't leave it locked in TX mode for too long.

First test was to connect it to my Alinco DR-735E (using the Adonis D-8MC cable) and it worked just fine! All the switches operated as expected and my audio reports were "Crisp and Punchy", so I'm happy with that.

UPDATE : 

Since writing the above, I've tested the AM-708E on a number of radios including Flex-3000, Yaesu FT-DX3000, FTM-400, FT-897D, Icom IC7400, IC-7100  - all with brilliant results! It's great to be able to switch between my HF radio and my VHF/UHF rig at the flick of a switch.

One guy I was speaking to in Canada (on 10W) was just amazed at the clarity of the audio on SSB and said my signal was weak, but my audio PUNCHED right through the pile up. I was so chuffed! The built-in speech compressor does a fantastic job on its 'LOW' setting.

UPDATE 2 : 

I now use this with my IC-7300 & IC-9700 combo.

UPDATE 3 :

Also works great on FT-891, EXPERT ELECTRONIC MB1