ICOM UK announce IC-R30

[m0lsx]

Is that Icom UK, or Icom Japan?

It was Icom UK & I suspect we may need to make the point as loudly as we can that this scanner is of no use for anything but listening to Dead Star & AM/FM signals in the UK. As otherwise some people may waste a LOT of money.

How may technically aware people in the west speak/write fluent Japanese?

That is why companies use people such as my wifes step father. He spent a lot of time going through owners manuals & advertising literature with a well known car manufacturer a few years ago. He was not there to translate, rather to work with what they had & make it more literate & easier to understand.

[G4RMT]

Bit silly because people will buy feel cheated and return them?

[m0lsx]

Bit silly because people will buy feel cheated and return them?

But can they return them, just because it's useless? Which means they buy them feel cheated & then they are stuck with a radio that no one wants, unless it's cheap & that damages the hobby.
Who is going to knowingly buy this Icom, when for two thirds of the price you can buy a whistler, that is usable on DMR?

[Metradio]

........Who is going to knowingly buy this Icom, when for two thirds of the price you can buy a whistler, that is usable on DMR?

The same numpties who are buying the pile of crap from AOR, the DV10 - because it has a few more modes and they fear they are missing 'something'..

Mike

[G4RMT]

My experience with digital mode scanners so far is that they're a quick to market, untested, untried product - totally unfriendly. The Whistler I bought is simply the worst radio, from the design aspect, that I've had for years and I simply do not trust it. It needs so much user intervention, that while if you are sitting with it, able to press buttons and adjust things - it works, but once you have lots of channels in them, you have to work hard to get them to do what you want. My Whistler stops on some digital noises in common bands and hasn't got a clue what they are, but the modes, or sub-modes seem quite common. As an example - I have quite a lot of dPMR equipment that talks to each other - from different brands, yet the Whistler only decodes some of them? No idea why.

If the Icom doesn't receive the most common mode, what exactly is it's design philosophy?

[m0lsx]

If the Icom doesn't receive the most common mode, what exactly is it's design philosophy?

If you look at the few digital modes it does have, a large percentage of them are digital modes commonly used in Japan & then of course Icoms own digital mode, Death Star. The worlds most expensive digital digital mode.
The scanner looks to be aimed at the Japanese market & those who want to spend stupid amounts just to listen to death star.
One of the reasons I like the new Network Radios, is they are what amateur radio should be all about, utilising what we can build/make use of/modify & then use for free. They are not about paying to use others over priced ideas.
With Network radio, the limit is a mixture of our imagination & what current technology limits us too. With Dumb Star it's what Icom will allow us to do & what they can make a profit from.
But as I said in a post above, for me one of the biggest potential limitations with the Icom is their history of building p--s poor scanners. The old handies were terrible & so wide open every signal above about S5 gave them grief.
Ignoring the lack of usable digital modes on the R30, this scanner, needs to prove it's better at rejecting unwanted signals than earlier Icoms were. As without that, then even on AM & FM, this is just going to be another crappy Icom scanner.

[m0lsx]

I have just seen this advertised on the Moonraker site. They are interestingly headlining it as a "Professional Wideband Receiver." Not as a digital receiver & when it comes to it's digital ability all that is said is

Decodes Various Digital Modes

And

The IC-R30 decodes various digital modes, including P25 (Phase 1), NXDN, dPMR, D-STAR (Digital Smart Technology for Amateur Radio) and Japanese domestic DCR (Digital Convenience Radio).

Which is not true as the above modes are the ONLY digital modes it decodes.
Clearly others are not convinced that this is a good digital scanner & are not pushing it as such.
I am not sure what qualifies it as a Professional radio though.