Got a new PMR radio

On monday I bit the bullet and decided I'm not going to get my misplaced Kenwood TK3101 back (longtime followers may remember this case, in short I borrowed it to someone and never got it back, I can't remember exactly to whom of the about 15 likely people and none of them have it laying around [so likely whoever borrowed it lost it]), these are professional quality units and simply cannot be compared with the stuff you get from supermarkets (also: you pay a price for that quality).

So I got myself a Yaesu/Vertex VX-146 from Uudenmaan Radio-Tele Oy which offers a very competetive price on the unit and is a nice little home-business run by a HAM-radio operator.

The unit is sturdy and has much nicer interface for setting the channel and "subchannel" (CTCSS/DCS) and fixes my major annoyance with the Kenwood which must always use subchannel (incredibly annoying, one would like to have at least channel 8 without any "subchannel" filter). Also with the PC software the seller had various more internal parameters can be tweaked (like transmit power, but naturally I wouldn't increase it even a bit as that would make the radio illegal [though the increase from 500mW to 1W is not really measurable outside RF labs]), while at it the guy also set the channel/subschannel settings to same as the Kenwoood defaults (much faster to do in bulk for 15 channels...).

I haven't really used it yet but we'll we leaving for a shortish (7-9 days) trip to Lapland with Taru and I'd guess I have more to write after that.