Monster Media 1993 #2/Image.iso/ham/prd793.zip/TM732A.5

Text File | 1992-11-17 | 3KB | 75 lines

TM732A.5

Subjective Impressions

Being a TM-741 owner, there were a couple of things that I
missed on the 732.  First, there's no real-time clock, no sleep
timer, no programmable ON time/ OFF time feature.  There is an
APO (automatic power off) with a preset time of 2:59:00 of
inactivity until power down.

Another complaint is the slow scanning speed.  The unit will scan
VFO or memory at no more than about 5 channels/frequencies per
second per band.  I consider this to be terribly slow in today's
age.  The slowness is probably due to the fact that the remote
contains all of the scanning logic and because the data path
between the head and the base is over a 2 wire serial data stream.

Another perennial complaint is that the radio does not cover
the entire UHF frequency band of 420-450 Mhz.  As shipped,
the unit will only operate over the range from  438 to 450,
(transmit or receive) which I find objectionable.

The manual is of typical quality and fairly complete although
not well indexed.  There are so many functions that a cheat
sheet is needed but as mentioned, was sadly not included.  In
typical fashion I note that the Japanese have never been able to
adequately and clearly explain how DTMF Squelch and Paging
works.  They've tried diagrams and jinglish explanations but in
the end you still end up reading the instructions over and over
before you fully understand them.  I'd love to see a plain
English discussion of how the DTMF features are intended to work
and how they really work in practice.  Follow that with a step
by step example and we'd probably have something that could be
more popular.

One of my reasons for buying the radio was to use the remote
mounted head option.  The option, the PG-4K kit, is advertised
as a 13 foot extension.  What you don't find out until you buy
it, however, is that only the display cable is 13 feet long and
the microphone cable is only half that!  To me this meant that
although the display cable would let me trunk mount the base,
there was no way I could get by with a 6 foot microphone cable.
The solution: buy the PG-4M(?) which is the longer model for
another $30!  Needless to say, I'm not a happy camper!  Are you
listening Kenwood????

On a positive note about the remote cabling, at least with the
732 it is possible to roll your own.  The 4 conductor head to
chassis connector cable could be easily spliced and extended, and
an ordinary RJ-45 extension cable could be used for the
microphone.  For many folks, however, it's probably easier
to just buy the short ($47) or the long ($78) cable kit.

The extension cable issue aside however, it still looks like it
will be a very good radio.  As always, after spending a big wad
of cash I'm automatically inclined to say that I like the
radio.  This is no exception, the TM-732 does a fine job at
heading off the competition at a good price-performance point.
The price is the same as the older TM-731 which was around $650
retail (real price, not the bogus MSRP).

To conclude, I think Kenwood has come up with a fine replacement
for the 731, and has put a lot of thought put into the design of
the 732.

See you on the air...

-fred,  AA7BQ

--
| Fred Lloyd  AA7BQ,  Systems Engineer          [e-mail] |
| Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation                   ...sun!flloyd |
| Phoenix, AZ    (If it's a fact, I believe it!)         [phone] |