What is the WORST rig you've ever had?

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (wd0ct @ July 03 2002,14:10)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">The worst is a tie between my Kenwood 241A and the Ten Tec Jupiter.

The Kenwood display works when it feels like it [most of them do this], despite being fixed once. This of course makes the radio a paper weight most of the time.[/QUOTE]<span id='postcolor'>
I have heard this about the TM-241a and have only had it rear it's ugly head one time. I have owned mine since 1994, but it has been used packet and was only mobile for a short period of time. When it did happen, I smacked the radio once with my hand and turned it back on. Once is adjustment, twice is abuse It fired right up without any problems.

I have had one problem out of my TM-733 though. I had a 25 Watt Uniden commercial radio running my APRS beacon. It's antenna was about 19" away from the TM-733's. It blew up the first RF amp in the TM-733's RX. Luckily I was an installer at a two-way shop at the time and was able to diagnose and repair it myself

A radio that I would not buy again is the ADI AR-447. I bought it for my girlfriend's mobile and it seemed like a good deal for $150. It has lots of features, but has two problems.

1) It's S meter is not calibrated AT ALL. I modified it so that I could bring it into calibration. After setting it, I found that it was not a linear scale and does not work much better after the mod.

2) The VCO is microphonic. If you do not use an external speaker, you get audio feedback at high volumes. Of course it is microphonic on TX too.

It's not total junk, there could be worse things wrong with it. I wouldn't not recommend it to anyone though.

-- Terry

 

 FT7100 from Yaesu.  Bad, stinks, cannot describe it

 

Absolutely, without a doubt, hands down, the ADI AT-600 Dual Band handheld I bought four years ago. It's got birdies in most inopportune places, internally generated noises on most repeater frequencies, and the poorest antenna I had ever seen. The antenna broke after I had owned it for several months, as soon as the warranty had expired the transmitter began dropping out. This was caused by cold and missing solder joints in the PA. The knobs have literally fallen off while tuning the VFO, and the battery lasted about 9 months. And, as bad as this radio performs with its rubber duck antenna, it's absolutely awful when connected to an outside antenna. I can hear up to three public service frequencies simultaneously when the receiver is not being desensed.
Whoever designed this ridiculous atrocity should be stripped of all human rights and forced to use this radio as net control on a storm watch.

 

I have seen several very poor rigs in my 45 years in the hobby. By my measures, ICOM rigs have been the worst. Their reliability is similar to other rigs of the same vintage but the non-standard gimmics used in the circuits double the time needed to trouble shoot and repair any problems. Except for newcomers, I believe most hams like to service their own gear and ICOM ignores this aspect in their designs. They could at least publish their gimmick list such as holding inductance with wax cores that fail under high heat. This complaint should not apply to operators who prefer to send equipment back in for service. ICOM rigs perform well.

 

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (n0phw @ July 04 2002,17:08)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Absolutely, without a doubt, hands down, the ADI AT-600 Dual Band handheld I bought four years ago. It's got birdies in most inopportune places, internally generated noises on most repeater frequencies, and the poorest antenna I had ever seen. The antenna broke after I had owned it for several months, as soon as the warranty had expired the transmitter began dropping out. This was caused by cold and missing solder joints in the PA. The knobs have literally fallen off while tuning the VFO, and the battery lasted about 9 months. And, as bad as this radio performs with its rubber duck antenna, it's absolutely awful when connected to an outside antenna. I can hear up to three public service frequencies simultaneously when the receiver is not being desensed.
Whoever designed this ridiculous atrocity should be stripped of all human rights and forced to use this radio as net control on a storm watch.[/QUOTE]<span id='postcolor'>
Man, that is a funny post! Thank you for that!

 

It's hard to pick just one.
I had an Alinco DR590 which was terrible for intermod. (The DR110 was no better). I could not use either one on an outside antenna because all I could hear was a mix of fire dispatch and paging bases. Fortunately the guy I bought the 590 from agreed to take it back. I replaced it with a Heath/Standard HW-24, which is good for intermod but has the awfulest user interface you ever saw. I absolutely cannot program it without referring to the manual.

 

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (n0phw @ July 04 2002,17:08)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Absolutely, without a doubt, hands down, the ADI AT-600 Dual Band handheld I bought four years ago. It's got birdies in most inopportune places, internally generated noises on most repeater frequencies, and the poorest antenna I had ever seen. The antenna broke after I had owned it for several months, as soon as the warranty had expired the transmitter began dropping out. This was caused by cold and missing solder joints in the PA. The knobs have literally fallen off while tuning the VFO, and the battery lasted about 9 months. And, as bad as this radio performs with its rubber duck antenna, it's absolutely awful when connected to an outside antenna. I can hear up to three public service frequencies simultaneously when the receiver is not being desensed.
Whoever designed this ridiculous atrocity should be stripped of all human rights and forced to use this radio as net control on a storm watch.[/QUOTE]<span id='postcolor'>
I have the Rat Shack version of this HT and it works great.I just dont like the size of it.Dave AE8U

 

My worst radio is my ADI AR-147. The display will sometimes totally geek out and display a hodge-podge of letters and symbols similar to Russian or Hebrew writing. It's obviously a design problem, cause I know  personally of, 4 other hams with the same radio, and they do the same thing. Other than that, I like the radio when I can read the display. That's my only complaint.

 

Can I nominate two rigs?  Our ham club purchased an Icom 740 and what a piece of junk.  We attempted to use the rig at field day once and found no rejection in the receiver.  Everyone in the club took turns attempting to adjust the rig for some selectivity with no luck. The 740 was so bad at FD we gave up and went and got a Drake TR4 to finish the event.  I am just glad it belongs to the club and not to me.  
My other bad rig is a 10 meter only job.  I traded a local Radio Shack owner, who also has a sports card shop, some extra baseball cards from my collection for a HTX 10.  What an abomination!  Audio is horrible in mobile environment, to many pushbuttons, and could never tell for sure what frequency I was on because of how the RIT is set up.  This rig is so bad I would trade it for a Swan FM2X any day.  73 Steve

 

The worst receiver I have owned is a Collins 51S1. I had 3 of them and what a piece of junk. A sick Drake will outperform them any day.

 

Been a ham for 31 years and owned a few rigs (mostly Kenwood) and some Heath. Never had a bad one. I've been very disappointed in a couple of antennas though. The Butternut vertical and the GAP Challenger both fell apart after about a year. The Butternut broke right at the base and after a couple of years of home-made repairs finally junked it. The GAP broke right in half at the 'gap'. Both antennas worked great, but the construction left quite a bit to be desired.

 

Finally a post where everyone isn't arguing! Nice to see a topic everyone can relpy to in a mature manner.

Here's my $0.02

I have had two horrible radios in my time. The first was the ICOM IC 2100H. The main thing about the radio that I hated was THERE IS NO SQUELCH. There is a knob labled "Squelch" but it is nothing more than an attenuator. You turn it untill the noise goes away, but after that, it attenuates the signals comming in. For example, on our local repeater frequency, during good conditions another distant repeater will come in around S-5. I would have to turn the squelch all the way up just to block out that distant repeater. Then, when my local repeater would transmit, the signal dropped from S9+ to like S1 to where I could barely even copy a repeater that was 10 miles away. Plus, two weeks after I had the rig, the final amplifier went out, and ICOM had to fix it about 3 times.

My other bad experience was with the Alinco DX 70. Horrible HF radio.

 

Worst radio?? Well, it was an ICOM !! I just absolutely hated the color. As for Atlas or Swan rigs, loved them all. Great rigs, because they caused you to become technical very quick, or you were off the air. I would guess the all time rig hated by me is the Yaesu 101. I hate them so much, can't stop collecting them!!

 

Although I cannot recall the model number, I had a used Yaseau all mode 2 meter transceiver that I picked up around 1983. When it worked, it was a solid performer. Problem was, this was only about half the time.

The power LED would indicate power was on, but the frequency display was non-existent and there was absolutely no RX or TX functionality. When this occurred, which was about every 15 minutes of use, I would slap the hell out of the top cover until the frequency display came back. At this point the rig was good to go for a few more minutes.

After having this rig, I have always stayed away from Yaseau equipment.

 

My worst rig was the Hallicarfters FPM-300 I purchased in 1973. The basic concept was nice--a transceiver small enough (at the time) to go mobile with AC and DC supplies built in. The problem was the lack of bells and whistles found on the imports such as the FT101 and Tempo One. Also, poor selectivity. It worked great on SSB (except during pile ups or contests) but a very poor contender on CW. I unloaded it after I became hooked on RTTY.