[TenTec] ARRL Review of FT9000

[Grant Youngman]

> Huh?  Does not appear to be worth 1.0 Orions.


When I was a youngster of about 13, deciding what receiver I wanted to put
with my DX-40 when I graduated up from the BC-455 I started out with, I used
to go through the Allied catalog and count knobs and switches.

39 knobs and 90-something push buttons.  Zowie!! On that basis, there's no
contest which current top-end radio must be the best :-)  I mean, compare
that with the piddling 8 knobs on the Orion.

Close-spaced numbers aren't specified of course for anything under 5 Khz,
and it will take someone who isn't dependent on advertising revenue to
test/publish those, but the numbers for IMDDR3 and IP3, while good,  aren't
particularly impressive given the fairly high MDS compared to most other
radios without the preamp on.  Sort of a "desense the radio and all the
other specs will look better" approach.

It's probably a good radio, and Yaesu fans everywhere will be sending their
wives and children to work at Wal-Mart so they can afford one, but I didn't
really hear anything approaching an unconditional "yippee!!" in the review
segments.  One reviewer commented how the radio "set [his] voice apart from
all the others", which I find hard to believe, even having never listened to
one, unless it sounded terrible -- like that was somehow a function of how
much one spends on a radio.  Garbage.

Grant/NQ5T