I recently bought a used Icom IC-A23 hand-held aviation transceiver and accessories, and have been playing with it.
This model has been discontinued by Icom, but I feel the newer IC-A24 is disadvantaged by its larger size. The IC-A24 does have a flip-flop feature to recall the last 10 frequencies entered, but I tend to use memories to store them anyway.
The A23 is very nice indeed with some great features:
- compact- size of your hand since the battery slides in back, not bottom, but won’t fit in most pockets
- solid, pro feel
- good reception, even from ground-level
- VOR navigation features
- backlit keypad (though alternate function labels are not lighted)
- 200 memories in banks of 10 with alphanumeric labels
- memories can be tagged as scannable or not – nice for skipping ATIS and VOR frequencies in memory
- uses standard 1/8 inch headset jack (nice for walking around and for glider pilots)
- 20 hour battery life
- duplex feature for simultaneous Rx VOR and Tx FSS
- 10 NOAA Wx frequencies (USA model)
- 20 second voice recording of signal
- can swap arrow buttons with top mechanical rotating dial – great if the dial malfunctions!
- belt clip is built-in to battery back
- after-market hi capacity batteries and accessories available
- can buy a cable to clone memory to other units.
Minuses are:
- no military frequencies, which would be very handy for airshows
- 15 hours to recharge battery
- unplugging headset or battery while unit in operation requires power cycle for correct audio on my unit
- dedicated feature for 121.5 emergency frequency, but not more modern ones like 243.0 and 406.025 MHz
- actually, too many features available on keypad for some users.
I also own a Narco HT 870 hand-held Aviation Transceiver and a Yaesu VX-5R hand-held ham transceiver.
The HT 870 is ok, but is an 80′s-style radio: no keypad backlighting, Wx, alpha labels, tagging or record feature, limited duplex operation to 122.10 MHz, only 10 memories, 1/4 inch jack, brick-shaped. It does operate basically the same as the Icom though: I did not need to read the Icom manual for most features to transition over.
IC-A23 VHF Aviation Transceiver Specifications
Radio manuals online
