August 19, 2025 • 17 mins
Discover the top 4 handheld ham radios for 2025 in this in-depth YouTube video! We review the best models for beginners and seasoned operators, focusing on range, features, durability, and value. Find the perfect radio for emergency communication, outdoor adventures, or amateur radio fun. Watch now to make an informed choice! #HamRadio #BestHandheldRadios #AmateurRadio2025
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This video is sponsored by Ham.Live - take your Net to the next level with this free logging platform - https://www.ham.live/views/intro
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ham-radio-2-0--2042782/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
What are the top four absolute best, highest dollar, most featured,
highest quality radios in the Ham radio world today. These
are my four picks, my top four radios that do
all of the things inside of Ham radio. Let's talk
(00:20):
about it. I get this question often about most of
these radios. Most of these radios, I get the question
about compare this one to that one? What is the
best one here? What's the best one here? This is
not a list of inexpensive radios. I did a top
(00:42):
five or seven radios under one hundred and fifty dollars
just a little bit ago, and probably got a couple
more lists like that coming out. But this is not
that list. This is the top of the line list.
What is the absolute, drop dead best radio from all
the good manufacturers. Maybe I'll do one for all the
other manufacturers as well, anyway, side note, because I think
(01:02):
about stuff like that, all right. This is the best
list of everything that we have in the Ham radio
world today at the time of this recording. This is
These are my four radios right here. And I get
asked about the comparison between these two and comparison between
these two often because this guy is the newest out
of all four of these. This one is the newest.
(01:23):
This one's probably the oldest, but it'll do a few
things that these others won't do. So we're going to
talk about all of these today. Number one, this first
one on the left here is the ICM ID fifty two. Now,
this is the Anniversary edition. The Anniversary edition has the
original ICOMMIT fifty two A that came out I think
(01:44):
maybe a couple of years ago, had a micro USB
charger on it so it was slow charging, and then
the ID fifty came out. I've done a little bit
of research, but I haven't been able to find very much.
In fact, that might be an AI question because I
dasked AI about these four radio Here I said, comparison
of hamdheld Ham radios, the ICM IDY fifty two A,
the Knwin D seventy five, the YASUFT five and the
(02:06):
any Tone. And I like most of what this had
to say. Okay, here's a comparison table. We're gonna read
through that here in just a minute. Okay, but this
one is USBC chargeable because it's the Anniversary edition. It's
also gray where the other ones are black. The ID
fifty is also USBC chargeable, and it's about one hundred
maybe one hundred and twenty five dollars cheaper. The price
(02:28):
is kind of fluctuate, especially depending on where you're where
you're buying it from. And I don't know why. Originally
I thought the ID fifty didn't have D Star, but
it does have D Star. The ID fifty has D Star.
So do you actually need this to get the icon quality?
Probably not. You can probably get most everything we're going
to talk about today with the icon from the ID fifty,
And I'm not one hundred percent sure what the difference
(02:50):
between those two are. The second radio we're gonna talk
about today is the yesu FT five D. Now, all
out of all of these radios I've had, I've had
the any Tone longer, but I've had the ID the
FT five almost as long, not quite as long as
the any Tone. So we're gonna talk about that here
in a second. So the FT five is great because
it has a touch screen. Out of all the radios
(03:10):
we talk about today, the FT five is the only
one with the touch screen. Some people like that, some
people don't like it. So you decide for yourself what
you want to do with that. But it does have
a touch screen that you can switch back and forth.
You can short press the power button will lock and
unlock the touch screen like that. Change the mode FM.
(03:31):
Oh yeah, we're on one forty six four five fusion
now FM. And the FT five has APRS, full APRS,
transmitting beaconing messaging. The FT five does have a quarty keyboard,
but the menu system is a little odd. As far
as getting the APRS functionality to work. We're gonna talk
(03:51):
about the Kinwood APRS functionality here in a second. But
unlike the Icon, the FT five has full APRS capabilities.
It does not have an open TNC, but it has
full APRS capabilities with beaconing, smart beaconing, transmit receive messaging.
It also, the one that I have comes with this.
It doesn't come with it. The one that I have
(04:11):
has this W zero a Z battery on it, and
so I've got a five amp hour battery that's USBC
rechargeable on this radio, and it makes that radio last
a really long time, even if you're beaconing APRS. The
Icon has no APRS and the Yazu has a full
APRS support. Now, this is the most popular question that
(04:32):
I get about these radios here, and I'm going to
talk about that here in just a second. In fact,
this question is what spawned the idea for this specific video.
All of these radios will do analog, analog, FM, wide band,
narrow band, the whole nine yards on analog. The Icon
does d Star, the Yaesu does JESU System Fusion, the
(04:53):
Kenwood also does d Star. Traditionally d Star is only
owned by Icon, but Kenwood got into the d Star
game with the model previous to this one, the D
seventy four, and then the any Tone does DMR. So
you've got your three top most popular digital voice modes
in amateur radio today represented by these four radios. These
(05:14):
two do d Star, System Fusion, and DMR. I used
to get this question quite offering, but I haven't heard
it in while. People will ask me, well, which digital
mode should I pick? Which one should I pick? And
I'd say pick the one that has the most repeaters
near you. There's some areas of the country and the
world that are covered up in d Star repeaters but
have no DMR repeaters. There's other areas that are up
(05:34):
covered up in system Fusion repeaters but no d Star repeaters,
and the list goes on, so it really depends on
what you where you want to talk, and how you
want to talk. If you get an open Spot for
open stop Spot three or later Open Spot three, open
Spot four four PRO or the new MIC, it will
allow you well, the open Spot three and four the
MIC has its own internal system, but the open Spot's
(05:56):
three and four will allow you to transcode anything to anything,
so you'd be able to transcode de start a fusion,
fusion to DMR, DMR to P twenty five, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. Some other digital modes that are
not listed on for these radios include NXDN P twenty five.
It seemed like there was another one. I can't remember
what it is right now, But those are lesser used.
(06:16):
It doesn't mean they're not as good. Those are lesser
used in the HAM radio community than these top three
modes are as of today, So that's something to note there.
So once again, like I said, when I got the
idea for this video, it's because from several different live streams,
I was getting asked what's the difference between the Icon
and the Kinwood. The first difference is price. Okay, you
(06:37):
can see and this is the AI table, and this
is pretty accurate right here, so you can see the
price of the ID fifty two A is approximately about
six hundred to six hundred and fifty dollars, while the
Kinwood is seven to fifty plus. I believe this. The
Kinwood was like seven forty nine or seven sixty nine
when it very first came out, which was not too
long ago, as earlier this year in twenty twenty five.
I don't think it's changed since then. So out of
(07:01):
all three, i'm sorry, out of all four radios we're
talking about today, the Kinwood is the most expensive. However,
it also offers the most features in my opinion, because
the Kinwood does d star just like the Icon does,
but it is a triband radio, so it will do
two twenty. It has full bluetooth that has APRS. APRS
(07:23):
messaging on the Kinwood is much much, much easier than
the Yazoo, so you can do APRS messaging on both
of these radios. You can actually do it over here
as well. Talk about that in a second. But the
APRS messaging men the menu system setting up the APRS
sending and receiving messages on the Kinwood is far easier
than it is on any of the other radios we're
talking about today, So that's something to be considered if
(07:45):
you are going to use APRS, if you're going to
use two twenty the two hundred and twenty megahertz band
for a local repeater, or if you have if you
want to use it simplex between you and a few
friends and kind of have the band to yourself. The
Kinwood is the only one we're going to talk about
today that does that. There is a way to hack
the any Tone and make it do two twenty, because
it's the mobile version of the any Tone comes to
(08:06):
twenty natively, but natively, this radio does not do two twenty.
There are ways to get around that do that if
you want to. It might void your warranty, but most
people probably don't care about that anyway. So I tell
people that if you're again, this one has a w
zero AZ battery on mind too. I did a whole
video about that a while back. If you're running APRS
(08:28):
and Bluetooth and a bunch of things on the Kinwood
with the stock battery, this stock battery will not last
all day. The stock battery is the only bottleneck on
the Kinwood. The Kinwood battery life is very low, very poor,
and with all the features the Kinwood has, it runs
down the battery that much quicker than any of the
other radios. Even the Yazu. The Yazy with the stock
(08:50):
battery beaking in aprs all day, will last longer than
the Kinwood with the stock battery beaking aprs for the
same time intervals for whatever reason. And even though the
Yazu has a bigger screen, the Kinwood still runs its
battery down faster. So I got around that issue by
getting the W zero eights five amp hour battery, and
I don't have that problem anymore. But if you're not
(09:12):
interested in two twenty and you don't care about APRS
as much, the Icon is the better choice because it's cheaper.
This radio with the stock battery will last me all day.
It doesn't beak an aprs. It does a thing called DPRS.
I have no idea about dprs. I don't know anyone
who uses the dprs. I don't know anyone who cares
about dprs. But it does. But that is a feature
(09:35):
of the radio. It will do that. So it does
have a waterfall scope in it. You can say you
can turn it into a dark mode and put it
dark mode behind the screen, and it has a few
other features like that. But monitoring this radio all day long,
I've never killed the battery on it. The battery of
Life is fantastic. And this is a very rugged, endurable radio.
You can just tell by the way it feels. You
can't get into an extended an icon extended battery for it. Also,
(09:57):
you can get different sized icon batteries for it. I
think they make some aftermarket stuff you can find on
Amazon as well. But it's just a dual band radio
where the Kinwood's a tryband. So if you don't care
about tryband and you don't care as much about APRS,
but maybe you've got another radio that does APRS, then
maybe the Kinwood's not for you, because the Kinwood is
a couple hundred dollars more time it's all said and done,
by the time you get the extended battery for it,
(10:19):
and maybe upgrade the antenna for it, which I've done here.
I've got the ZBM two antenna on mine right now.
By the time you do all that, you probably have
spent another one hundred one hundred and fifty dollars on
all of that. But additionally, now those of you who
really do like APRS and do like wind link and
other modes like that, the kin would also has a
full open kiss T and C. If you don't know
(10:40):
what that is, look it up. We'll do another video
on that later. Basically, it means you can connect apps
like APRS droid directly or like wind Link over Android
directly to this radio via Bluetooth and use wind Link
APRS from a much more robust app like aprsroid. And
there's an iPhone equivalent I don't remember what it's called, Okay,
(11:03):
So you can totally do that natively with the Kinwood.
You can make that work on any of these radios,
even the Kinwood, even THEE I keep pointing at this
and calling it the kin With even the icon, you
can get like a mobile link Mobi linked Bluetooth TNC
and connect it to any radio you want and use
APRS droid. But again that's an additional expense. You don't
need that for the kinwod. It already has all of
(11:24):
that built in. Now with d Star, DMR and system Fusion,
you can connect. Those are systems that will allow you
to connect to the Internet and talk to users worldwide.
And if you ever join a net, you can use
your hotspot and any of these radios to join various
digital voice nets that happen every day around the Internet.
(11:45):
I recommend using ham dot Live for your next net.
Go to ham dot Live on the website check in
to the net. It is a free service that works
on all platforms. They are the sponsor of today's video.
It allows you to take your net to the next
level because it has a little chat box in there.
You can chat with other people who are checking into
the net or waiting for their turn to check into
the net. You can check out the video that I
(12:06):
did the interview that I did with Sean, the creator
of ham dot Live on this channel. Thank you ham
Live for supporting this video. The any Tone, now, this
is the radio that I've had for the longest time.
Out of these four radios, the any Tone D eight
seven eight UV two plus is in my opinion, the
top of the line DMR radio in today's world. It
will hold about four thousand channels okay in its memory.
(12:30):
It will do APRS, full beaconing, full message transmit and receive.
It's not as intuitive as the kin would or even
as the Yazou. I think the even the Yazu's more
intuitive on the APRS, and I think it's a little
bit more reliable. I think the Yazou and the kin
would both have better receivers than the any tone does,
(12:51):
so they pick up more packets on aprs. But you
can totally do a full APRS with the latest version
of the eight seven eight UV two plus. It holds
four thousand channels. Like I said a second ago, most
of these other radios only hold one thousand channels. It's
got a much bigger memory, it's got a more colorful
screen than these two. It's about the same number of
(13:12):
colors as the Kinwood, i'd say, and you can do
a few more things on it. And if you're into DMR,
DMRs used to be the fastest growing digital voice mode
in amateur radio. I think they've kind of leveled out
these days. I don't know. There's still a lot of
people I know that use DMR. But if you're into DMR,
you want to use DMR repeaters or DMR hotspot near you,
this one is the one that you're gonna want to get.
(13:34):
I really like all four of these radios, I don't
necessarily think I would trade one for the other, because
they're all so different in their digital mode capabilities. I
thought about selling the Yazoo or the Icon when I
got the Kinwood, because the Kinwood was so expensive. But
I like the Yazu a lot, and I like the
fact that it does beacon the APRS. If I go
to a hamfest, I might take this one and put
(13:57):
it at the campsite and leave it there plugged into
a toy volt battery, and put this one on my
belt and carry it around. That way, I'm APRS at
the campsite and I'm APRS on the go. It's possible
I've got too much APRS, but no, I don't really
think that's a thing. And I thought about selling the
Icon quite frankly, because the Icon. Out of all of
these radios, the Icon's the only one that doesn't do APRS.
(14:18):
It's just dual band. These three are just dual band. Again,
you can hack this one. I don't necessarily recommend that,
but you can do it if you want to. But
you can hack this one. These two are dual band.
This one's a try band. So if you consider the
fact that if I was to get rid of the
Icon right now, out of this list, I wouldn't lose
anything because the Kinwood will do because all of them
(14:40):
do dual band. The Kinwood will do D Star, and
the Kinwood does Tryband. So really the only thing that
this one has going for it is the d Star.
Some guys that are just Icon fanboys out there, and
there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not selling this radio.
I'm not going to sell this radio. I really like
this radio. This is the radio that I keep on
my bag most of the times. I have an everyday
carry backpack that I take with me on trip, so
I usually have it with me in the truck. This
(15:01):
is the radio that I have on the side because
I know that if I get this one charged up,
it's gonna last several days on the battery because I'm
not letting it sit. I'm not letting it stay on
all the time. So if I'm ever out and about
and I just need to grab a radio to do something,
this is usually the one I have in my bag,
so I can grab it, turn it on. It's gonna
be powered up. If not, I can charge it via
USBC and go from there. The one drawback about the
(15:23):
any Tone is that it is not USBC chargeable, but
it does have a USBC chargeable battery on it, much
like the Yazoo Jesu's aftermarket any Tone is a stock battery. Well,
I think there's stock now. When I got the any Tone,
they didn't have USBC chargeable batteries, but I think nowadays
the stock battery it actually is USBC chargeable, So you
can pretty much USBC charge any of these radios with
(15:46):
the external battery with the aftermarket battery on the Yazoo
or the Yazu and the Kim would both also take
a direct twelve volt connection, so you can charge them
that way as well, So a few differences there. But
I think the icon is probably we offers the fewest
features out of all of these because it doesn't have
aprs and it has D Star, which the kin would
(16:06):
also have, so the d Star is duplicated no APRS.
If I was to get rid of this and take
it out of the picture, I wouldn't really lose anything,
But again I'm not gonna do that because I really
like that radio. I like how long the battery last,
I like how loud it is, how great it Sounds
has got fantastic audio bost transmit and receive, So I'm
definitely going to keep that one in my stockpile right here.
(16:28):
But those are the top four radios from Kon, Yazu, Kinwood,
and any Tone. Any Tone is the only Chinese radio
we talked about today. The other three are Japanese radios.
So again I get this question off. I'm like, what
would you choose between the Icon and the D seventy
five or the Yazu and the D seventy five the
kin Wo D seventy five and a lot of time.
(16:50):
And the reason I've been seeing this question a lot
lately is because this is the newest radio out of
the four that I just showed you. This one just
came out two or three months ago at the time
of this recording, so it's the newest radio out of
all of them, and it's the most expensive one, but
it also offers the most features. I think if that
Kinwood had DMR instead of D Star, I might say,
(17:12):
you know what, let's just sell my other stuff and
get a couple of those and call it a day.
Because it's triband full Bluetooth, easy APRS and now it
has DMR, but unfortunately it just has d Star, which
is my least favorite mode, but you guys might like it.
Tell me what you think about these? How many of
these do you have? Do you have all four of
these like I do? If I didn't have a YouTube channel,
I probably wouldn't known all four of these. But which
(17:33):
one do you like the best out of all four
of these? And why? Put a comment in the video below.
Thanks for watching.
What are the top four absolute best, highest dollar, most featured,
highest quality radios in the Ham radio world today. These
are my four picks, my top four radios that do
all of the things inside of Ham radio. Let's talk
(00:20):
about it. I get this question often about most of
these radios. Most of these radios, I get the question
about compare this one to that one? What is the
best one here? What's the best one here? This is
not a list of inexpensive radios. I did a top
(00:42):
five or seven radios under one hundred and fifty dollars
just a little bit ago, and probably got a couple
more lists like that coming out. But this is not
that list. This is the top of the line list.
What is the absolute, drop dead best radio from all
the good manufacturers. Maybe I'll do one for all the
other manufacturers as well, anyway, side note, because I think
(01:02):
about stuff like that, all right. This is the best
list of everything that we have in the Ham radio
world today at the time of this recording. This is
These are my four radios right here. And I get
asked about the comparison between these two and comparison between
these two often because this guy is the newest out
of all four of these. This one is the newest.
(01:23):
This one's probably the oldest, but it'll do a few
things that these others won't do. So we're going to
talk about all of these today. Number one, this first
one on the left here is the ICM ID fifty two. Now,
this is the Anniversary edition. The Anniversary edition has the
original ICOMMIT fifty two A that came out I think
(01:44):
maybe a couple of years ago, had a micro USB
charger on it so it was slow charging, and then
the ID fifty came out. I've done a little bit
of research, but I haven't been able to find very much.
In fact, that might be an AI question because I
dasked AI about these four radio Here I said, comparison
of hamdheld Ham radios, the ICM IDY fifty two A,
the Knwin D seventy five, the YASUFT five and the
(02:06):
any Tone. And I like most of what this had
to say. Okay, here's a comparison table. We're gonna read
through that here in just a minute. Okay, but this
one is USBC chargeable because it's the Anniversary edition. It's
also gray where the other ones are black. The ID
fifty is also USBC chargeable, and it's about one hundred
maybe one hundred and twenty five dollars cheaper. The price
(02:28):
is kind of fluctuate, especially depending on where you're where
you're buying it from. And I don't know why. Originally
I thought the ID fifty didn't have D Star, but
it does have D Star. The ID fifty has D Star.
So do you actually need this to get the icon quality?
Probably not. You can probably get most everything we're going
to talk about today with the icon from the ID fifty,
And I'm not one hundred percent sure what the difference
(02:50):
between those two are. The second radio we're gonna talk
about today is the yesu FT five D. Now, all
out of all of these radios I've had, I've had
the any Tone longer, but I've had the ID the
FT five almost as long, not quite as long as
the any Tone. So we're gonna talk about that here
in a second. So the FT five is great because
it has a touch screen. Out of all the radios
(03:10):
we talk about today, the FT five is the only
one with the touch screen. Some people like that, some
people don't like it. So you decide for yourself what
you want to do with that. But it does have
a touch screen that you can switch back and forth.
You can short press the power button will lock and
unlock the touch screen like that. Change the mode FM.
(03:31):
Oh yeah, we're on one forty six four five fusion
now FM. And the FT five has APRS, full APRS,
transmitting beaconing messaging. The FT five does have a quarty keyboard,
but the menu system is a little odd. As far
as getting the APRS functionality to work. We're gonna talk
(03:51):
about the Kinwood APRS functionality here in a second. But
unlike the Icon, the FT five has full APRS capabilities.
It does not have an open TNC, but it has
full APRS capabilities with beaconing, smart beaconing, transmit receive messaging.
It also, the one that I have comes with this.
It doesn't come with it. The one that I have
(04:11):
has this W zero a Z battery on it, and
so I've got a five amp hour battery that's USBC
rechargeable on this radio, and it makes that radio last
a really long time, even if you're beaconing APRS. The
Icon has no APRS and the Yazu has a full
APRS support. Now, this is the most popular question that
(04:32):
I get about these radios here, and I'm going to
talk about that here in just a second. In fact,
this question is what spawned the idea for this specific video.
All of these radios will do analog, analog, FM, wide band,
narrow band, the whole nine yards on analog. The Icon
does d Star, the Yaesu does JESU System Fusion, the
(04:53):
Kenwood also does d Star. Traditionally d Star is only
owned by Icon, but Kenwood got into the d Star
game with the model previous to this one, the D
seventy four, and then the any Tone does DMR. So
you've got your three top most popular digital voice modes
in amateur radio today represented by these four radios. These
(05:14):
two do d Star, System Fusion, and DMR. I used
to get this question quite offering, but I haven't heard
it in while. People will ask me, well, which digital
mode should I pick? Which one should I pick? And
I'd say pick the one that has the most repeaters
near you. There's some areas of the country and the
world that are covered up in d Star repeaters but
have no DMR repeaters. There's other areas that are up
(05:34):
covered up in system Fusion repeaters but no d Star repeaters,
and the list goes on, so it really depends on
what you where you want to talk, and how you
want to talk. If you get an open Spot for
open stop Spot three or later Open Spot three, open
Spot four four PRO or the new MIC, it will
allow you well, the open Spot three and four the
MIC has its own internal system, but the open Spot's
(05:56):
three and four will allow you to transcode anything to anything,
so you'd be able to transcode de start a fusion,
fusion to DMR, DMR to P twenty five, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. Some other digital modes that are
not listed on for these radios include NXDN P twenty five.
It seemed like there was another one. I can't remember
what it is right now, But those are lesser used.
(06:16):
It doesn't mean they're not as good. Those are lesser
used in the HAM radio community than these top three
modes are as of today, So that's something to note there.
So once again, like I said, when I got the
idea for this video, it's because from several different live streams,
I was getting asked what's the difference between the Icon
and the Kinwood. The first difference is price. Okay, you
(06:37):
can see and this is the AI table, and this
is pretty accurate right here, so you can see the
price of the ID fifty two A is approximately about
six hundred to six hundred and fifty dollars, while the
Kinwood is seven to fifty plus. I believe this. The
Kinwood was like seven forty nine or seven sixty nine
when it very first came out, which was not too
long ago, as earlier this year in twenty twenty five.
I don't think it's changed since then. So out of
(07:01):
all three, i'm sorry, out of all four radios we're
talking about today, the Kinwood is the most expensive. However,
it also offers the most features in my opinion, because
the Kinwood does d star just like the Icon does,
but it is a triband radio, so it will do
two twenty. It has full bluetooth that has APRS. APRS
(07:23):
messaging on the Kinwood is much much, much easier than
the Yazoo, so you can do APRS messaging on both
of these radios. You can actually do it over here
as well. Talk about that in a second. But the
APRS messaging men the menu system setting up the APRS
sending and receiving messages on the Kinwood is far easier
than it is on any of the other radios we're
talking about today, So that's something to be considered if
(07:45):
you are going to use APRS, if you're going to
use two twenty the two hundred and twenty megahertz band
for a local repeater, or if you have if you
want to use it simplex between you and a few
friends and kind of have the band to yourself. The
Kinwood is the only one we're going to talk about
today that does that. There is a way to hack
the any Tone and make it do two twenty, because
it's the mobile version of the any Tone comes to
(08:06):
twenty natively, but natively, this radio does not do two twenty.
There are ways to get around that do that if
you want to. It might void your warranty, but most
people probably don't care about that anyway. So I tell
people that if you're again, this one has a w
zero AZ battery on mind too. I did a whole
video about that a while back. If you're running APRS
(08:28):
and Bluetooth and a bunch of things on the Kinwood
with the stock battery, this stock battery will not last
all day. The stock battery is the only bottleneck on
the Kinwood. The Kinwood battery life is very low, very poor,
and with all the features the Kinwood has, it runs
down the battery that much quicker than any of the
other radios. Even the Yazu. The Yazy with the stock
(08:50):
battery beaking in aprs all day, will last longer than
the Kinwood with the stock battery beaking aprs for the
same time intervals for whatever reason. And even though the
Yazu has a bigger screen, the Kinwood still runs its
battery down faster. So I got around that issue by
getting the W zero eights five amp hour battery, and
I don't have that problem anymore. But if you're not
(09:12):
interested in two twenty and you don't care about APRS
as much, the Icon is the better choice because it's cheaper.
This radio with the stock battery will last me all day.
It doesn't beak an aprs. It does a thing called DPRS.
I have no idea about dprs. I don't know anyone
who uses the dprs. I don't know anyone who cares
about dprs. But it does. But that is a feature
(09:35):
of the radio. It will do that. So it does
have a waterfall scope in it. You can say you
can turn it into a dark mode and put it
dark mode behind the screen, and it has a few
other features like that. But monitoring this radio all day long,
I've never killed the battery on it. The battery of
Life is fantastic. And this is a very rugged, endurable radio.
You can just tell by the way it feels. You
can't get into an extended an icon extended battery for it. Also,
(09:57):
you can get different sized icon batteries for it. I
think they make some aftermarket stuff you can find on
Amazon as well. But it's just a dual band radio
where the Kinwood's a tryband. So if you don't care
about tryband and you don't care as much about APRS,
but maybe you've got another radio that does APRS, then
maybe the Kinwood's not for you, because the Kinwood is
a couple hundred dollars more time it's all said and done,
by the time you get the extended battery for it,
(10:19):
and maybe upgrade the antenna for it, which I've done here.
I've got the ZBM two antenna on mine right now.
By the time you do all that, you probably have
spent another one hundred one hundred and fifty dollars on
all of that. But additionally, now those of you who
really do like APRS and do like wind link and
other modes like that, the kin would also has a
full open kiss T and C. If you don't know
(10:40):
what that is, look it up. We'll do another video
on that later. Basically, it means you can connect apps
like APRS droid directly or like wind Link over Android
directly to this radio via Bluetooth and use wind Link
APRS from a much more robust app like aprsroid. And
there's an iPhone equivalent I don't remember what it's called, Okay,
(11:03):
So you can totally do that natively with the Kinwood.
You can make that work on any of these radios,
even the Kinwood, even THEE I keep pointing at this
and calling it the kin With even the icon, you
can get like a mobile link Mobi linked Bluetooth TNC
and connect it to any radio you want and use
APRS droid. But again that's an additional expense. You don't
need that for the kinwod. It already has all of
(11:24):
that built in. Now with d Star, DMR and system Fusion,
you can connect. Those are systems that will allow you
to connect to the Internet and talk to users worldwide.
And if you ever join a net, you can use
your hotspot and any of these radios to join various
digital voice nets that happen every day around the Internet.
(11:45):
I recommend using ham dot Live for your next net.
Go to ham dot Live on the website check in
to the net. It is a free service that works
on all platforms. They are the sponsor of today's video.
It allows you to take your net to the next
level because it has a little chat box in there.
You can chat with other people who are checking into
the net or waiting for their turn to check into
the net. You can check out the video that I
(12:06):
did the interview that I did with Sean, the creator
of ham dot Live on this channel. Thank you ham
Live for supporting this video. The any Tone, now, this
is the radio that I've had for the longest time.
Out of these four radios, the any Tone D eight
seven eight UV two plus is in my opinion, the
top of the line DMR radio in today's world. It
will hold about four thousand channels okay in its memory.
(12:30):
It will do APRS, full beaconing, full message transmit and receive.
It's not as intuitive as the kin would or even
as the Yazou. I think the even the Yazu's more
intuitive on the APRS, and I think it's a little
bit more reliable. I think the Yazou and the kin
would both have better receivers than the any tone does,
(12:51):
so they pick up more packets on aprs. But you
can totally do a full APRS with the latest version
of the eight seven eight UV two plus. It holds
four thousand channels. Like I said a second ago, most
of these other radios only hold one thousand channels. It's
got a much bigger memory, it's got a more colorful
screen than these two. It's about the same number of
(13:12):
colors as the Kinwood, i'd say, and you can do
a few more things on it. And if you're into DMR,
DMRs used to be the fastest growing digital voice mode
in amateur radio. I think they've kind of leveled out
these days. I don't know. There's still a lot of
people I know that use DMR. But if you're into DMR,
you want to use DMR repeaters or DMR hotspot near you,
this one is the one that you're gonna want to get.
(13:34):
I really like all four of these radios, I don't
necessarily think I would trade one for the other, because
they're all so different in their digital mode capabilities. I
thought about selling the Yazoo or the Icon when I
got the Kinwood, because the Kinwood was so expensive. But
I like the Yazu a lot, and I like the
fact that it does beacon the APRS. If I go
to a hamfest, I might take this one and put
(13:57):
it at the campsite and leave it there plugged into
a toy volt battery, and put this one on my
belt and carry it around. That way, I'm APRS at
the campsite and I'm APRS on the go. It's possible
I've got too much APRS, but no, I don't really
think that's a thing. And I thought about selling the
Icon quite frankly, because the Icon. Out of all of
these radios, the Icon's the only one that doesn't do APRS.
(14:18):
It's just dual band. These three are just dual band. Again,
you can hack this one. I don't necessarily recommend that,
but you can do it if you want to. But
you can hack this one. These two are dual band.
This one's a try band. So if you consider the
fact that if I was to get rid of the
Icon right now, out of this list, I wouldn't lose
anything because the Kinwood will do because all of them
(14:40):
do dual band. The Kinwood will do D Star, and
the Kinwood does Tryband. So really the only thing that
this one has going for it is the d Star.
Some guys that are just Icon fanboys out there, and
there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not selling this radio.
I'm not going to sell this radio. I really like
this radio. This is the radio that I keep on
my bag most of the times. I have an everyday
carry backpack that I take with me on trip, so
I usually have it with me in the truck. This
(15:01):
is the radio that I have on the side because
I know that if I get this one charged up,
it's gonna last several days on the battery because I'm
not letting it sit. I'm not letting it stay on
all the time. So if I'm ever out and about
and I just need to grab a radio to do something,
this is usually the one I have in my bag,
so I can grab it, turn it on. It's gonna
be powered up. If not, I can charge it via
USBC and go from there. The one drawback about the
(15:23):
any Tone is that it is not USBC chargeable, but
it does have a USBC chargeable battery on it, much
like the Yazoo Jesu's aftermarket any Tone is a stock battery. Well,
I think there's stock now. When I got the any Tone,
they didn't have USBC chargeable batteries, but I think nowadays
the stock battery it actually is USBC chargeable, So you
can pretty much USBC charge any of these radios with
(15:46):
the external battery with the aftermarket battery on the Yazoo
or the Yazu and the Kim would both also take
a direct twelve volt connection, so you can charge them
that way as well, So a few differences there. But
I think the icon is probably we offers the fewest
features out of all of these because it doesn't have
aprs and it has D Star, which the kin would
(16:06):
also have, so the d Star is duplicated no APRS.
If I was to get rid of this and take
it out of the picture, I wouldn't really lose anything,
But again I'm not gonna do that because I really
like that radio. I like how long the battery last,
I like how loud it is, how great it Sounds
has got fantastic audio bost transmit and receive, So I'm
definitely going to keep that one in my stockpile right here.
(16:28):
But those are the top four radios from Kon, Yazu, Kinwood,
and any Tone. Any Tone is the only Chinese radio
we talked about today. The other three are Japanese radios.
So again I get this question off. I'm like, what
would you choose between the Icon and the D seventy
five or the Yazu and the D seventy five the
kin Wo D seventy five and a lot of time.
(16:50):
And the reason I've been seeing this question a lot
lately is because this is the newest radio out of
the four that I just showed you. This one just
came out two or three months ago at the time
of this recording, so it's the newest radio out of
all of them, and it's the most expensive one, but
it also offers the most features. I think if that
Kinwood had DMR instead of D Star, I might say,
(17:12):
you know what, let's just sell my other stuff and
get a couple of those and call it a day.
Because it's triband full Bluetooth, easy APRS and now it
has DMR, but unfortunately it just has d Star, which
is my least favorite mode, but you guys might like it.
Tell me what you think about these? How many of
these do you have? Do you have all four of
these like I do? If I didn't have a YouTube channel,
I probably wouldn't known all four of these. But which
(17:33):
one do you like the best out of all four
of these? And why? Put a comment in the video below.
Thanks for watching.
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