ICOM IC-7400

And it arrived.....

The Icom IC-7400 arrived and I must say, it is MINT+++ with not a single mark or scratch on it. Very impressed! But how does it work?

Well after faffing around connecting it to power and to the MFJ 993B ATU, I soon discovered that yes, it works fine. Nice audio from the built-in speaker and without reading a single word of the original manual, I was soon chatting away on 40M SSB. I then flicked it over to 2M and chatted to some local friends who reported good signal and audio.

I was using the supplied (original) microphone but I will probably also buy a lead to give me the option of using my Adonis AM-708E desk-mic. The radio has built-in speech compression and you can also tailor the transmitted audio, with adjustment to both treble and bass.

The screen is big and bright - love it! There's lots of button, knobs and dials and they all have a great feel to them apart from the four tiny rotaries on the bottom left of the rig - they're just a bit too small for my liking. And they're proportionally longer than they need to be which always gives me the feeling that they'll be under undue lateral load over the years. It's also quite annoying not having a readout for the power-setting; you have to key-up to see the power on the bar-meter.

Moving from band to band and mode to mode is very simple and so too is the tuning - be it fine or coarse. The menu system is pretty intuitive and like I said, I've not had to pick up the owners manual yet.

At the back, the radio provides two HF antenna connections and one for 2M (all of them being SO-239). There's connections for a linear, data, tetc, etc and one for an external tuner. Speaking of tuners, the radio has one built-in and it's good for up to 3:1 matches.

It has a bandscope (of sorts) which was probably considered very good in its day, but it seems a bit old hat now that there are so many rigs with high resolution panadapters and waterfalls. It's one of those passive things that you have to manually set sweeping and the audio cuts out while it's doing so.

The filtering on the radio is pretty impressive and you can adjust the filter shapes in SSB & CW even on 2M! The radio uses the same 32-bit IF DSP as used in the IC-756 PRO-2 and overall, I really warmed to this radio right from the get-go. I look forward to using it more and will probably set it up in the shack for winter so that I'm completely familiar with it by the time it goes out on any field days.