It is interesting that in so many years with so many radios that you cannot quickly see the short comings of a 450. Selectivity is marginal at best on SSB, shape factor on CW is a wide 4 to 1 (even a old school analog 480 was a shape factor of less than 2 to 1 on cw with option analog filter) As I said earlier 7200 has much better performance. 450 also gets AGC thumped easily. Noise blanker are marginal too. As far as looking like a CB it does with cheap front panel design and display that is not good in bright light either. And list goes on.....
John (W8JX),
Other than using the rigs at Universal Radio, have you had another chance to use a FT450? I ask because I wonder if the one you were testing was somehow bad or if someone got into the alignment menus and started messing with things. I don't know why we had such different experiences, but I have used a FT450 and a FT450D in several contests, with a modest gain antenna (a small beam). I did not notice any AGC thumping or desense in the presence of strong signals. I have used some radios with very poor front ends and have seen desense occurring. In contest conditions I would run the FT450 with the preamp off (IPO on) as it is plenty sensitive as it is. On 40 meters I would usually have the preamp on and the attenuator on because that seemed to give the best signal to noise ratio.
I didn't spend a lot of time checking out filter shapes and such on the FT450 but I would sometimes see how close I could get to a loud signal with the narrow filters on. I didn't see anything that suggested really broad filters, like high pitched signals or a low rumble from the loud signal getting past the filter skirts. These are just my experiences in contest conditions, and I have run plenty of contests with different radios, and the FT450 wasn't a bad performer with the preamp off and the noise blanker off if the band was really crowded. Many radios are like that.
The noise blanker in the FT450, as you state, isn't exceptional. It works pretty good on ignition noise, but not so much on line noise or RFI crud. Still, I have used rigs with worse noise blankers. The noise reduction in recent Yaesu rigs is different than in other radios, in that increasing the numbers on the NR setting doesn't increase the amount of noise reduction like it does in Kenwood and Icom rigs. It was like that in the FT100D and the FT857/897, but in their newer rigs the different numbers represent different noise reduction algorithms, and sometimes going to a lower number actually did better. It just depended on the type of noise you had.
I didn't play around much with the contour filter on the Yaesu FT450/950/891, so I never really found a huge benefit with it. There might be ways to set it up where it really does make a difference. On the FT450 I found a setting that kind of worked like a peak filter on CW, but it wasn't as good as the APF filter found on the FT1000/FT100/FT857/FT950 and FT891. I don't know why Yaesu left that feature off of the FT450, it does do a great job on CW.
In terms of dynamic range, here are the close in dynamic range numbers from QST for several radios that have been discussed in this thread, all were tested at 500hz bandwidth and the preamp off:
Radio 5khz IMDDR 2khz IMDDR
FT450 75 67 (QST measured the bandwidth at 665hz instead)
FT450D 86 76
FT950 91 71* (using 3khz roofing filter)
TS480 75 72**
IC7200 83 67
IC7410 98 88 (using 3khz roofing filter)
* Rob Sherwood measured 79db (
www.sherweng.com). QST might have tested the non PEP model
** QST didn't test 2khz IMDDR when this was reviewed. This number came from Rob Sherwood's data, and was tested without the 500hz filter.
This should give a general idea as to where these radios stand with intermodulation dynamic range, which is probably the most important measure of a receiver's performance.
One thing to feel good about is that there are plenty of good radios out there for less than $1000 today. You can get what were once top of the line radios for less than that-Icom 781, Yaesu FT1000, Kenwood TS950 are all good performers, with dual receiver, over 100 watts out, and lots of filters. Reliability might be an issue, though.
73 John AF5CC