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Reviews For: Icom R6

Category: Receivers: Scanners

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Review Summary For : Icom R6
Reviews: 7MSRP: 199
Description:
Mini wideband hand-held scanning receiver
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.icomamerica.com/en/products/receivers/handheld/r6/default.aspx
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0074.4
PY2ONU Rating: 2020-10-17
Best handle receiver! Time Owned: more than 12 months.
this receiver is excellent, the best hand receiver I've ever had (I've had many models from many brands). The finish is perfect, Japanese quality ICOM already known. It works, so it's great, very fast and accurate scanner. A little susceptible to interference for use in urban environments and indoors, but this radio is fair for outdoor use so I do not consider this fact to be very relevant.
Using the Icom R-6 guarantees many hours of fun!
M0ASW Rating: 2019-06-10
Value for Money Time Owned: 6 to 12 months.
Am owning this little thing now for a year I want to report the following: (Upgrade as a frustrated user of a totally useless Alinco DJ-X3.)
The good things:
Well first impression was that it is really nicely made, felt solid like ICOM or Yaesu normally does. It is very small and light and lies well in your hand. It comes with two very lightweight NiMH batteries and I had little belief in them. Yet I must say that I still use them and the radio lasts quite long on them, and I mean several hours scanning. That's why I never used the dc jack on it yet.
The display is crisp, and alphanumeric, the knob feels like a quality part and reacts well, fast or slow. I have not used it much with its own antenna, I am using and external antenna on the car roof. The original whip is probably quite poor but when e.g. near an airport it's probably ok. Had no issues with large signals so far, the Alinco was atrocious near our local municipal a/p and I needed the attenuator all the time and then blanking out the distant station.Buttons feel positively tactile. I use it mainly for airband and I am totally content with it's performance. I did not have it on any test gear but it was a great upgrade from the Alinco.
Scanning is reasonably fast yet I do not believe the published figures proclaiming miracle speeds.
Once programmed it does all I want it to do and does UHF airband very well. I am using it mainly in the car, it is a perfectly fine Rx that doesn't take much space and neither needs a big DIN bracket.
AM is great, so is FM e.g. Marine, I have not bothered with the AM bar very much so nothing to report. What I found surprising recently is that the little speaker jack has enough umpff to drive an external 4" speaker and now the radio really shines and the sound quality is professional radio-grade :). So that will be a permanent installation now. Will have more battery drain of course. That brings me to the negative aspects:
Lesser good things:
The internal speaker is too small of course to produce good sound. Audio is difficult to understand at times. Didn't like it with an earphone either but that maybe due to Chinese low price junk. It clearly lacks the lower frequencies and that is irritating when the squelch breaks and only noise is on offer. It is more like sharp hiss. I did not buy the programming SW and for anybody who has a more serious application I recommend that you do. The programming is really tedious and it has an odd way of arranging and storing memories. When yo are used to memory banks it will feel weird at first as the memory is very flexible. Yes, you can have named and unnamed memories at the same time. Also the keys have three functions printed on them. Nice :( If you want to label memories with names it gets really hairy when you do a bunch of them. Clearly you will forget the way to do these things after a while esp. when you own many radios. Awkward user interface, perhaps a bit improved from the Alinco. You can do a lot with it but I only use the basics and mainly AM. What I did not get on with was the voice squelch, good idea but it appears to be a bit slow. Also how to remove it when programmed can become a real challenge in the menu labyrinth. It would be lovely to have the keys backlit but there you are. The orange display backlighting is adequate with good contrast at night.
To summarise I like it and it ticks most of the boxes for me except for the awkward user interface. Obviously that's limited with the few keys it has on offer. Not too bad a choice at all if you always scan the same banks. Can't complain much for the price.
W2WHT Rating: 2019-05-11
Follow on report Great receiver Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I have been using this scanner/receiver for a while now. I broke down and bought the BUTEL ARC 6 software to program it. As I recall the software was 30 dollars which seems like a lot until you actually use it. Once you see how the program organizes things you will make far better use of the receiver than you ever could programming manually. I think it is because the software allows you to visualize the memories in banks. You can also import frequencies from a lot of different sources including csv files which are really common files in radio programming. I have nearly a thousand frequencies in my R6 and I have them organized so I can get to them quickly. As my radio is a couple of years old I can say I am extremely pleased with it and it works as well today as the first day I got it.
KI4WCA Rating: 2015-03-28
small and hot RX Time Owned: 6 to 12 months.
The R-6 has horrible ergonomics...no dedicated keypad for frequency entry is one huge fail.

But the compromise for tiny size pays off if you need a tiny scanner with excellent battery life and hot RX performance.It is wonderful for trains and aircraft...and also perfect where digital comms are not used like my location.It scans fast and works great with the included antenna.MF and LF performance is poor.Mid VHF up is excellent.A great portable scanner...which I programmed manually and that took a while...and I used the manual.

For tiny and excellent RX and decent audio it is unbeatable.The small size means horror ergonomics...but RF from mid VHF up performance is excellent.I charge 2500MAH LSD cells in a Maha 9000 and they last for a very very long time.

Excellent micro-sigint rig.....HF is actually usable which surprised me.MF and LF is not.

Great scanner....poor dc to daylight.

5 for tiny and hot scanner performance while merely sipping the AA cells.
W4HH Rating: 2013-09-06
VERY difficult to program and use Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I've had my R6 for three years. When I first got it, I programmed it with about a dozen local public service freqs . . . took an hour to program it, very frustrating, had to read step-by-step through the manual with each freq. Finally got it programmed.

For the past three years, it's been monitoring those freqs. Five days ago, I needed to add another freq but could not find the manual and without it, I cannot operate the R6, beyond turning it off and on.

This "scanner" may be sensitive, selective, and the like but it is NOT "user-friendly." The buttons and the sequence in which each must be pressed is not intuitive.

Other owners likely have positive experiences with their R6 but my experience was 99% negative. It's no longer in use; I'm selling it on eBay and will let someone else have the headach.
WZ3O Rating: 2013-07-01
Hot receiver in a tiny package.. Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
***1st a must for anyone serious abt using this R6 to it's full capabilities buy the Icom cable or maybe you can make one, Butel ARC6 software and pop for a subscription to RadioReference.

***That said it's got more memories and bands than u can use in any given day, I have 6 surrounding Counties PD/Ecomm freqs, abt 500, imported with the Radio Reference interface ...slick stuff (I know I'm kinda' blending ARC6 & the receiver, but it's difficult to separate the 2)

***Great hot receiver if you ditch the dummy load called an antenna Icom provides, I use an Opek flexible whip..works well on HTs also ...Too many features ...too little time ;-)

***Play with it for a while to acclimate yourself, read manual..actually one of the better written I've seen..

***Don't let the lack of buttons concern you it's fairly straight forward...

***BUT as I say if you serious abt filling the 1000 memories with different Ecomm services, shortwave etc and using it's capabilities...get the cable, get the sofware and by all means Radio Reference, it's your new best friend... HI

*** I'd give it a 4.6 but rounded up to a 5..nothing is perfect..
PAULGBLUNDELL Rating: 2010-06-17
R5 with major improvements Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
My Icom R6 wideband hand held arrived yesterday (as did my Pro 2035 so I had two radios to program last night Wink )

After spending some time programming it up with around 160 channels I can report a few positive things about it.

- The scan and search speed is MUCH better then the R5 was, I would say close to 40 - 50 channels a second with them all being in order, it can scan the UHF CB band (40 channels) in less then 1 second. Searching the Air band was also very quick and that would be around the same speed or maybe even a little quicker.

- The CTCSS tone decode works very well, it takes a few seconds to find the right tones but at least it can be turned on and off as required.

- Programming is very easy and I was able to do most of this (except adding alpha tags) without ever looking at the manual.

- From my limited testing last night (I did have another radio I needed to play with too Grin ) no major problems with any bands and overload / FM BCB or TV audio being in places it should not.

- Finally Icom have got it right and you can link scan bands together and scan any mix of these, no longer is it one bank or all bank scanning like on the R2 and R5.

Overall if you took the R5, increased the scan / search speeds, added the multi bank scanning and reduced the battery drain you would end up with the R6. I used to own an R5 a few years ago and was very happy with this except for the slow scan / search speeds and bank scanning being limited to one or all banks, in the R6 Icom have fixed this.

Paul