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Reviews For: Icom R-70 General Coverage receiver.

Category: Receivers: General Coverage

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Review Summary For : Icom R-70 General Coverage receiver.
Reviews: 23MSRP: 750
Description:
Compact, professional looking radio, blue flourescent display, 100hz readout.
Product is in production
More Info: http://
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
00234.7
K6JJB Rating: 2003-02-09
Very Good 0.1-30MHz Receiver Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I was given my R-70 in 1999 by the first owner after years of non-use. Because I was interested in 10M repeaters at the time, I found and installed one of the IC-EX257 FM units. Although the radio and FM unit worked, I was convinced that the R-70 was capable of much better performance than I was then getting. Since I had invested very little money up to that point, I decided to ship the radio with installed FM unit to ICOM in Bellview, Washington with a note asking them to troubleshoot the whole radio and fix everything. ICOM fixed and shipped the radio back in just 9 days. ICOM charged me $150, the performance since then has been very good and I consider the repair cost to be money well spent. I have not experienced any of the difficulties mentioned by the previous two reviewers. I recently installed a new International Radio (Inrad) #109 2.4 kHz bandpass filter for about $45 less than the ICOM FL-44A would have cost me new. The push through pins of the #109 fit perfectly. Selectivity and fidelity on SSB were both improved. I am going to keep my R-70!
K7NG Rating: 2002-12-01
Still hard to beat Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I got an R-70 receiver new about a year after they were introduced (which would be about a year before the better-known R-71 showed up). To this day I think I have not come up against a better performer...on average. The receiver is wonderfully sensitive and it has excellent selectivity. I put the optional FL-44A SSB filter in mine and it should be compulsory for those who want to listen to SSB or data mode signals. Outstanding noise blanker.

OK, I like mine (I still have it). Does it have any less-than-excellent characteristics? My two bits' worth:
(a) I had a problem with AM BCB stations crossmodulating the front end when I was operating below 6 MHz. I made a four-section elliptic HP filter with cutoff at 1.7 MHz and reduced that.
(b) The VCO's that are part of the first LO gave (still do) me all kinds of grief. They apparently were made up of components that aged greatly and they eventually wouldn't lock in the third loop. I got a set of parts from Icom that were supposed to fix the problem, and did, for a few months. I have substituted some different components that have worked OK but I still found I had to realign the VCO coils periodically.
(c) Only two memories. This is less of a problem than you might think.

I have a radio-science project on my personal drawing board that will require multiple independent HF receivers and I intend to acquire several R-70's as the basic platforms. 'Nuff said.
73, K7NG
SIERRAHOTEL Rating: 2002-08-17
Performed well, but lots of problems!! Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I would have give the R-70 a score of "4", excpet for all the problems I had with mine.

I had an old Hammarlund HQ-145 that was in only fair shape when I bought it at a garage sale, and one day the power transformer died, and I sold it to someone who restored old boat anchors. I looked around, and tried out several different radios, and finaly settled on the R-70. About two months after I bought it, the R71A appeared, of course.

When I first got it, I was thrilled!! It was very stable, all the controls worked well, and I thought it looked really neat, too! Then one day, I was listening to hams on 20M, and I noticed they seemed to be drifting badly. It got worse and worse, and got to the point it was almost impossible to get anything intelligible for more than 30 seconds. One of the chrystal oscillators had died. After a trip to the service center, it came back way out of alignment. I sent it back, and it came back perfect that time.

A few months later, it suddenly lost any audio output. It went to Universal this time, and it was a bad solder joint. A few months later, it started having a problem with horrible distortion that got worse the longer it was turned on. A trip back to Icom fixed it, but now I was paranoid, with good reason. Less than a month after I got that problem fixed, I suddenly lost almost all sensitivity anywhere! I was fed up! I took the thing apart, and found what looked like four bad joints near where the antenna lead ties into the RF Amp. I hit them all,and it worked! It was better than ever, and for another couple of months, behaved itself. By this point, I was checking into other receivers, and just waiting for the R70 to die again. It did!! One day, USB just quit. I found yet another bad solder joint, and that was it, and I had pretty much had enough.

With the exception of the problems I had with solder joints, I really liked the R-70.

Good Points:

Stable
Nice tuning knob
Well constructed.
Good SSB audio.

Bad Points:

Bad quality control
Bad AM audio
Retuning necessary when changing modes.
Controls too small.