Friend of mine loaned me a brand new one week old FT710 for me to configure it to his like and also to do a full test compared to my two years old Icom IC-7300. After several hours setting it up and testing it up on different bands and freqs and switching back and forward same antennas from one radio to the other these are my findings:
Benefits or improvement over the IC-7300
1-The received noise is 2 to 3 db less than the 7300
2-The received audio quality is by the same, before I set both radios RX EQ on zero to have flat audio on both. I did not hear any difference in audio quality.
3- But after enable the "spacial effect" received audio, using the balance control and the phase shift freq adjustment, yes the received audio with the 710 is impressive and better than the 7300.
4- ON TX audio, after configured the 3 parametric EQ in the 710 and both radios with the stock hand mic I found the 710 TX audio is much better than the one at the 7300, I monitored myself in my 7300 when TX with the 710 and I was very impressed with the great audio response.This 710 TX audio response goes from 50 to 3050 for 3 Khz bandwith and in my 7300 TX bandwith goes from 70 to 2900 for 2.83 Khz BW.
In this TX audio configuration there is one parameter that is very important to set, the AMC makes big difference in your modulation fidelity, you have to set it to your own voice but the higher you set it up the wider your audio spectrum will go, I set it up at 80% and reports were better than the factory default setting at 50%.
5-The menu on this 710 is very intuitive, is very easy to open and configure using just one control while on the 7300 is navigating within an extensive menu sometimes hard to configure.
6-The DIMMER function in the 710 is very useful to save the display life expentancy specially if you are using an external monitor as I am now and see only the external display and not the one at the radio. This feature also exist on the 7300
7-The TX AGC has a slower time delay making the PEP higher and driving harder my amp, lets put it in different way, when driving my solid state 1200W with the 7300 my peaks are from 700 to KW and when using the 710 peaks are from 850 to 1KW.
So far those are the benefits I have found in the 710. Now lets review the negative aspects of this new radio:
1- OH GOD! who had in japan the great idea to make those panadapter signal peaks so FAST, my eyes were tired after a while looking at it and there is no way to slower that speed, even there is one switch marked speed it will control only the water fall speed because this radio as well as the FTDX101D and the FTDX10 lacks one function called in the 7300 "AVERAGING" allowing you to select three different speeds for the signal peaks. Also the panadapter has not enough sensitivity and even the strong signals over 20db are not high enough on the spectrum. My 7300 has a much better panadapter than this 710.
2- I have admired and congratulate Yaesu for many years for having the best DNR on the market, after owning several Yaesu radios I was enchanted with the performance of this well designed circuit BUT What a frustation with this DNR on the 710, it has 15 steps to adjust the level but you can't even go further than 4 because if you advance this level trying to cut more noise, the received audio will be DISTORDED to the point to not undestand what the station are saying, tonight I tested on 80M both radios with stations within the high noise level and I could pulled them out easily and very clear with the 7300 using its NR set at level 7 but not with the 710 because of the received distorsion, it sounds robotic with some extra weird electronic sounds. There is something good about this DNR and its capable to save the level adjistments per bands so you can decide which band to use it and what level you want to have on each one, this useful feature does not exist on the IC-7300.
3- The 7300 has three available DSP filters just touching on the display the filter sign, you will see FL1,FL2 and FL3 that you can configure to any bandwith you like to use, in this 710 there is only two filters available WIDE and NARROW, both are also configurable with the menu, I have 3Khz for wide and 1.8 Khz for Narrow.
4- The slot to insert the SD card is in the wrong position, why? because if you plug it in and then install the external speaker on the left side, what happen is that you won't be able to remove the card unless you remove the speaker, so my advice is to install the speaker always on the right side as I did.
5- Any menu you open to configure it, it will disapear in 3 seconds, so Yaesu should give it more time to stay on to give you time to set your parameters properly.
6- The antena tuner in the 710 will be able to tune SWR as high as 5 to 1 in less than 3 seconds and I personally tested my 80M dipole in a non resonant freq where the swr was high, it worked fine BUT there is something everybody should be awared of, and its in the manual, it will not save in its memories any tuning that be OVER 2 to 1 meaning if you go to a freq that is over 2:1 swr it will not tune by itself and you will have to tune it again, that is not good. In the 7300 even will not tune swr over 3:1 all settings will be saved in its memories and the 7300 has a special function called EMERGENCY in which you will be able to tune up to 10:1 with reduced power to 50W.
I have been following Yaesu radios for years and this company is too difficult in terms of fixing design problems with Firmware updates, I don't see a soon update to fix the panadapter issue and the distorsion with the DNR but if they fix these problems, I will purchase one of these.
Hector
AD4C
202Спасибо
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