| SIERRAHOTEL |
Rating:      |
2002-08-15 | |
| A great radio, but has a few flaws |
Time Owned: more than 12 months. |
Yupiteru scanners aren't available in the US, abut are in Canada and the rest of the world. I first saw one of these during a trip and happened to run into a ham from Canada who had one and let me play with it. After that, I really wanted to get one, and about a year later, I was suddenly offered the one I bought for a good price, and I grabbed it.
This thing does about everything, and does it pretty well. It has exceptional audio, it's very clear and clean. It doesn't have a huge amount of volume available though, since the speaker isn't very large. Of course, like all the "DC to Daylight" handhelds, HF is kind of a "bonus", and can't take the place of even a cheap portable. But with a decent hunk of wire, and a switchable attenuator I made, it receives pretty well. SSB does drift a little for about 15-20 minutes, but after that,it's pretty stable, and is very clear. The AM filter is a little too wide, but much better than other, similar handhelds I have tried/owned over the last few years, including the AR8000, Yaesu VR500, and the Alinco DJx10. The Yupi is better than any of these, for several reasons. The AR8000 had excessive intermod at my home, not so great audio, and the Yupi is much more sensitive. The VR500 has firmware issues, bad SSB audio, and so much intermod I returned it.
The Alinco ate batteries at a stunning rate, scanned at a slow 5-7 channels/sec, and had a very annoying user interface. The 9000 scans at about 30 Ch/sec, and, once you get used to it, a very easy programming/operating scheme. When I first got mine, I had some difficulty programming it, the manual is horrible, but I found a better one available for free, or as a book at www.strongsignals.net, and things became much easier. I have about 500 channels programmed out of the 1000 available, and all the 20(!!!) search ranges set up. These are linkable, like the memory channel banks, and it's very nice to have when trying to hunt something down.
Positive points:
Great Construction, display and Keypad.
Great Audio, best I have ever heard in a handheld scanner.
Good scan speed.
Super flexible scan and search abilities.
SSB reception is very good, once it warms up.
The bad points:
No PC programming!!
Bandscope is pretty, but semi useless.
Battery life not great.
No trunk tracking of course.
Lots of CPU noise on some freqs, and has floating birdies tht appear on first powerup, then dissapear.
No PL/CTCSS.
Has bad intermod in 800-900 MHZ bands, so bad in some areas the radio is almost useless.
There are several versions of the MVT 9000, the lastest one is silver, like the picture. Bandercom does upgrades on older units to improve intermod and CPU noise problems and increase scan speed.
One of the improved 9000's would be nearly perfect, with the exception of the lack of trunk tracking. Even with the flaws my "MK1" 9000 has, it's the only "all in one handheld" I have kept. |
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