Icom IC-207: First Impressions

My Icom IC-207H arrived this afternoon. My first reaction was, “”Wow, this thing is small.”” I’d say that it’s about a third of the size of my old IC-22U, and the IC-22U is a 2m-only rig. Here are some other first impressions:

• I guess they had to do this because of size restraints, but unlike the IC-22U, there is no power connector on the rear panel. Instead, two wires, terminated by some odd kind of connector, protrude from the rear of the unit. Fortunately, my local radio store had a matching connector, so I could make an adapter to connect the rig to my AC supply.
• I think my poor, little Heathkit AC supply has reached the end of the road. While it works just fine at 5W and 10W out, it just can’t supply enough current to the rig at 20W output.
• The programming seems awfully hard to do. I’ve mastered the procedure for programming channels, but haven’t even tried tackling the scan sequence yet.
• This thing has a noisy fan which kicks in whenever you transmit. I suppose that you really need the fan at 20W or 50W, but I wonder if it’s really necessary at 5W or 10W. If not, they should just leave it off when operating at low power.

I haven’t yet tried it on 440. Never having operated much on 440, I didn’t have a suitable antenna. While at Purchase Radio buying a power connector, I saw that they were selling a dual-band antenna called the Q-Stick. Constructed mainly of PVC pipe, it looked almost homebrew. There was no manufacturer’s identification on it, but it looked like it was well made, and it was only $35, so I bought one.

After I got it home, I did a Google search and found a weird, little Internet electronics store that carried them. It also appeared that they might be the company that made them as well, but when I emailed them about getting more info on the antenna, they replied that they no longer carried them, even though they were still advertised on their website. They did give me the phone number of the guy who supposedly designed the antenna, but I haven’t called him yet. Very weird.

The Google search also turned up a Q-Stick Antenna website at http://www.q-stick.com. Unfortunately, that website is no longer working. I hope I haven’t just thrown away $35.