I got my new V86 today. I charged it up and began to try it out. First the good news. It sounds nice and gets very loud! Excellent! It also gets into local machines nicely on 7 watts. Now for the bad news. It is a direct conversion receiver. When connected to my comet outdoor antenna it folded like a house of cards. Pagers were bleeding through EVERYWHERE. Performance on wx stations was awful with the external antenna as the radio overloaded and got lots of horrible interference. Compared to my old IC-V8 it has better audio and a nicer display...and a very poor strong rf environment receiver. The V8 easily copied weak wx stations with no evidence of the gonzo spurious responses the V86 had. My IC-T70A is also fantastic on the outdoor antenna and works perfectly on it. I find the V86 to be a very overpriced toy. It is the first Icom product I ever purchased that disappointed me. Pay the extra money and buy a T70A and get an epic 2m/440 dual band analog radio with a hot receiver and great performance. IC-V86....Not recommended. Edited to add...pagers break the squelch with just the rubber duck. And even when copying a strong station with the duck, you can hear trash/spurious junk coming in too. So much FAIL.
Color me very disappointed...for what it is it should be 30 dollars. Seriously. I guess the baofeng effect made them decide operators would not notice how poor it is.
Hi friends, Do you know how to mod this radio to transmit 136 to 174 Mhz?, I don´t find any information. 73´s
I've not seen anything on mods so far, even for MARS/CAP. I've only seen a couple of very basic reviews of any kind. I have a feeling it's not a popular radio.
I have one, I would rather have a Alico DJ-196, which was what I bought the Icom to replace due to its age. I don't mind it as much as others in this post.
