Yaesu VX-7RNow, for a complete review of the Yaesu VX-7R. After having the radio for about a week, I have had time to play with some of the different features and use the radio in a few different ways. Here are some of the things I have found about this particular radio.

First, I would like to say that yes, it is waterproof. One of the largest selling points of this radio for me was that it was said to be waterproof and I wanted a radio that I could bring with me in my kayak. This past weekend, I was a the lake with my kayak and someone was kind enough to tip me over while I had the radio in the boat with me.

Even with a waterproof radio, the first time that it goes under the water there is a feeling that you get that makes you want to get it out of the water as soon as possible and make sure it still works. It did still work and got quite wet several times after that.

The next thing about this radio is that it is definitely not designed with one-handed operation in mind, but then again, neither are most of the other hand held radios on the market today. Yes, you can use it with one hand, but when you start trying to adjust settings, change frequencies, and use the DTMF tones you will need to use both hands. Also, if the keys on the keypad were back-lit when the screen was, it would make using it much easier in the dark; this is another thing that most other hand held radios do not feature.

While on the topic of the keypad, The layout of the buttons does take a little bit of getting used to. Most radio keypads are laid out like the buttons on a telephone, but this particular radio has the 0 to the right of the 6 and the button that works as the * is next to the 3 and the # to the right of the 9. After using this radio for a short period of time, I was able to get used to the keypad layout and switch between this and other radios with no problem.

At one point, the radio was off and I wanted to turn it on in the dark. This radio does have a short “boot sequence” when it is powered on that is a bit longer than other radios, and it would be nice if the back-light would turn on when the radio is powered up, this problem would be solved. I do have other hand held radios that do this.

The battery life of this radio is quite impressive. I don’t know the exact amount of time that I was on with a single charge, but I would estimate it to be approximately 20-24 hours if not more. Most of this time was just monitoring and/or listening to other people, but there was a fair amount of transmit time during this time as well and almost all of the transmit time was on high power.

One thing I would like to be different in regards to the battery is that when the battery died, I had the radio on monitoring the local repeater and there was no traffic at the time. I happened to look at the radio at one point and realized that the battery had died. Most of the other hand held radios that I have used have a low battery warning that lets the user know when the radio is at the end of the battery life, that is something that this radio should probably have.

As reported in my first thoughts, the transmit reports are pretty good and the radio seems to have a little bit better transmit performance than some of the other handhelds I have used. The receive on this radio is also fairly impressive. I received some broadcast FM with it and the stations sounded pretty good. One thing I noticed was that in some cases, a station would be coming in loud and clear and then it would cut out. After opening the squelch a small amount for the WFM mode, this was solved.

This radio has a neat feature in that there are separate squelch settings for the WFM and NFM modes. A good purpose for that is demonstrated by listening to broadcast stations. When listening to broadcast stations, you may want to have the squelch set a bit looser than you would for receiving NFM transmissions.

In the receive for NFM, the radio also performed quite well. At one point, I was monitoring an FRS frequency and began hearing some static. A little investigation showed that I was picking up signal from someone transmitting on a frequency two FRS channels away from the one I was listening to. By tightening up the squelch for the NFM mode, this issue was eliminated.

One neat feature that this radio has is a built in spectrum analyzer. I’m not sure how useful this would be for most purposes, but it is somewhat fun to play with when looking for any activity in a given frequency range.

The fact that this radio can be used in either single or dual band mode is also a bit of a selling point. Putting the radio into single band mode when there is only one frequency that you want to monitor allows you to view the clock as well as wonder which of the two frequencies you are on a given transmission was on if you are not looking at the radio.

Having it in dual band mode, allows you to easily monitor two frequencies simultaneously without having to use scan mode. The scanning features of this radio are one thing I have not played with, but they look to be quite useful with several different scan modes and scan banks that different frequencies and memory channels can be put in to.

The belt clip for this radio is somewhat both a positive and negative point about it. The design of the belt clip is useful because it makes it very easy to carry the radio and take it off your belt to use it and put it back easily. The drawback is that because it is two pieces, there is something extra to lose.

All in all, this is a pretty good radio that will easily do what I bought it to do and much much more. I won’t be surprised if I find myself using this radio more than the other hand held radios that I have.