I  currently have three HT’s that I have acquired over the last several years.  How many HT’s does one person need you ask ?  A good question.  In addition to three HT’s I have three handheld scanners and a multitude of FRS/GMRS/XFRS radios.   If I were to log the time that I spend on my radios I would find that I spend about 96% or maybe more of my time listening.  So for me I have the following priorities when selecting an HT.

1)  I like to have DC to daylight coverage.  I am not sure why because really I spend most of my time listening to AM/FM and VHF government frequencies and then the VHF/UHF Ham radio frequencies.  But I like to know that if I really wanted to I could listen to other frequencies as well.

2) Great memory scanning capabilities are really important to me.  That is I want to be able to  skip particular channels,  have the option to hold a busy channel until its not busy,  and to wait for a selectable amount of time before proceeding to the next channel.  Also a priority channel is a really nice option.

3) AM/FM are requirements.  SSB and CW are nice to haves.

4) Multiple power options (as many as possible).  I prefer lithium as the primary rechargeable battery power as I personally have never had very good luck with NIxx batteries.  Also being able to power from Alkaline batteries in an emergency is very nice option to have.

5) Submersible and very rugged (I have really been spoiled by the Yaseu VR-7 and VR-8 radios).

6) I really like a dedicated volume and squelch knob but as the HT’s get smaller this seems to be a rarer thing to find.

7) HT’s can actually be too small.  Especially as I get older my fingers seem to get bigger and my vision is certainly not what it used to be.  So if the keys are too small, or the labeling is too small, or the display is too small it becomes much less fun to use.

Lighted keys is a great option.  I have found this to be true for my computer keyboards as well.  I just can’t imagine not having lighted keys now that I have them.

9) Programmable from a PC.  A minimum of being able to load the memories but other control functions are great as well such as setting the options for the backlight and contrast.

In my current line up of HT’s the oldest one is the Yaseu VX-7R.  I have had this HT for five years now and I really liked it and have enjoyed using it.  It has all of the scanning features that I like and it receives pretty much DC to daylight or at least to 999mhz.  I also really liked being able to listen to this HT in the shower and or out in the weather with no worry about it getting wet.  What I didn’t like about it was that the scanning functionality was unreliable.  By that I mean sometimes it just wouldn’t to a memory scan.  Other times it would only stop scanning on a busy channel for 2 seconds and then it would move on no matter how I had it configured.  Sometimes it would just completely forget all of its memories and I would have to reprogram it.  Not a really big deal as this could be done from a PC but this just reinforced my feeling that it wasn’t a reliable radio that I could count on in an emergency.  Also while this HT covered lower frequencies such as the  AM broadcast band and the HF radio bands it didn’t hear very well at those frequencies unless you attached a proper external antenna.  But if you did that you could easily overload the receiver with too much signal and be unable to hear the signal that you wanted.  The final straw was the poorly designed SMA connector.  It has little support for third party antennas and is easily broken.  I only did that once but once was enough.

So this started me down the road looking for another radio.  This led me to the Kenwood TH-F6 which I immediately fell in love with.  The memory scanning capabilities of this radio are second to none.  It is much easier to use and program then the VX-7R and I found that after using the radio for just a few days I no longer had consult the manual for most normal functions.  I  feel comfortable that I could take this HT into an emergency situation and be able to reprogram it on the fly without having the manual.  This HT become my day to day radio to use unless I was expecting severe conditions such as rain.  It also has much better sensitivity on the AM and lower HF bands then the VX-7R by far.  What I didn’t like about this radio was its size.  It is only 2/3 the size the VX-7R.  This means that the keypad is smaller and the display is smaller.  Also it seems to be much more fragile although I haven’t really had anything go wrong except for the external power connection.  Sometimes when I plug in the external power the radio seems to quit working for a while.  It has always come back but this seems to be a weak point according to some of the blogs about this radio.  The other issue with this radio is that it isn’t in any way water proof so its difficult to think of this as a tool for emergency use.  So I continued down the road looking for the perfect HT which led me to the VX-8DR.  It is thinner then the VX-7R but the keypad and display seem to be at least as big as the VX-7R.  It has the same robust construction and water proofing as the VX-7R which I really appreciate.  It also has a much more robust antenna mount than the VX-7R.  In addition with its built in AM antenna bar it actually does a pretty good job on the AM broadcast band and on 160 meters.  The scanning functions also seem to have been fixed so that it seems work as expected.  This is definitely my new favorite radio.  That doesn’t mean it is perfect.  After two weeks I still need to reference the manual to program easy things such as repeater access tones.  But most of the most used functions are easily accessible such as the squelch and volume functions even though they don’t have dedicated knobs.  As usual Yaesu has gone overboard with the latest and greatest.   This unit as optional blue tooth and GPS functions that you can add when you want to.  I have added the bluetooth functionality and I have been using it with my Plantronics headset and I am very satisfied.  I had to tell you that my past experience with bluetooth has really been or miss.  Especially with PC’s so my expectations with the HT were not too high.  But I was pleasantly surprised by how well and even more importantly how reliably it worked.  The separate programming socket is also a much better implementation then the strange combo programming/mic/speaker jack on the VX-7R.  The plug covers also seem to be much more robust and much less likely to be lost.  So far the only downside that I have found is the price.  If you were to purchase all of the options plus the radio you could easily spend close to $1000.00 which is a LOT of money.  But so far it seems to be a huge improvement over the VX-7R.  I  will update my impressions after using this for a few more months.