2012-05-09

Yaesu FTM350-AR fail

So, I've been looking at getting an APRS setup for a while now. The radio I really want for the job is the Yaesu FTM350. It has almost everything I want, and best of all I'm sure it'll interoperate nicely with my other Yaesu gear (the automatic range check, would be particularly handy)... but it's lacking two stupidly obvious features. These aren't difficult features to add, either, both being software. The first feature is the ability to output waypoints to a NMEA compatible GPS unit for display purposes. The Kenwood has been doing this for years now: http://www.tornadovideos.net/forum?func=view&catid=11&id=205&limit=10&start=650

The Yaesu will actually write waypoint data in NMEA format to it's com port. You'd think that means it will do all of this... but apparently this is not the case. It will only write one waypoint: yours. It took some convincing on the behalf of Tim Factor (the Amateur Radio tech support guy for Yaesu) to make me believe that this was the case. I still can't figure out what the engineers who built this were thinking. Was it "well, clearly the user is going to want to send his current location from the GPS in the radio to... an after market GPS that already has the same data?" I presume it's intended to be read by a computer for transmission up to the internets... but this is a mobile rig. I don't have an internet connection in my truck. Of course if it was giving me waypoint information about all the stuff that's coming in over APRS, and I could display that on a GPS, well, that'd be useful. Incredibly useful. Worth buying the radio and GPS useful. If I was using it as a base station, I could feed it into a computer and upload it to APRS.fi or some such. It would make sense as a feature. But as implemented the feature is not just pointless, it's a demonstration of brain-dead stupid design.

The new Yaesu also lacks digipeater functionality. This is a mobile rig, so clearly there aren't any situations where I'm going to want to use it as a repeater. You know, since it's got a built in cross-band repeater (which is one of it's major selling points, in my opinion), you wouldn't want comparable functionality for the APRS side...

I'm super annoyed because this radio has so much promise. But such glaring omissions make me scratch my head. I keep hoping that some up-and-coming company will build a radio that plugs into an android phone and is fully controllable over USB. I'd pay real money for a radio that has an interface that was designed some time after the 90's, not to mention programmability that goes beyond stunningly limited.

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