- It's great.
- It's louder than I expected. It uses relays (yay, I love relays :-) ), and cycles them on and off very quickly. My wife thought it was broken, and I had to assure her that was normal behavior. You would not want to try to sleep near it when it decided to retune.
- When I switch bands, reception is muted until I do a quick transmit to let it know the new band I'm on. Didn't expect that, although in hindsight it's obvious.
- None of there online documentation makes it sound like it comes with a power cable (which it does, unterminated). I thought I was going to have to visit "The Shack" to get the right connector to build my own!
- Although I added its power connectors tapping off the main supply, this is going to push me to get the Power Pole distribution system working.
- It has a "rebate" of a 1:1 or 4:1 balun. I don't have a need for one right now, so I have to guess what I'll need in the future.
- The bar graph display of power and SWR is a lot more usable than I expected. Still, it seems to me for a similar cost they could have put in a few 7-segment LEDs instead (or the n-segment ones that display letters).
- The user-interface is modal and complicated once you get past basic tuning (basic tuning is trivial, but all the features are going to take a while to figure out). Is there a rule in ham design that says everything has to be very modal?
- It seems to re-tune more often than I expected. I guess I thought there'd be a tuning for a band, but any movement off a frequency to a nearby one seems to be a cause for re-tuning. Again, not a complaint, just an observation...
So far, I love it. What an improvement over my MFJ-871 that had some "factory defects" and was very touchy about tuning...
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