I've only had it a few hours and have only listened but so far it's great. I got it due to the begging of a friend that got one and kept saying how great it was. After checking into the features I tend to agree. They really seemed to put some thought in to all of this. The audio quality is great. It has a slightly different sound than IMBE since it's AMBE. It sounds less watery and more CVSD old school Securenet. Don't get me wrong... it's not rough like Securenet but it has that kind of fine digitized sound to the voice.
The signal I was listening to wouldn't even register on the S meter on the scanner since the repeater is so far away but the Icom had no problems at all decoding. I haven't figured out all the rest of the features of the digital mode yet so that's the project for this evening when I go up to the KC area.
The radio is built very well. The back is all metal and the plastic feels like a Motorola. It seems to have a great receiver that extends from AM broadcast to about 1000Mhz.
I just sold a 2 year old IC-91AD and upgraded to an IC-92AD. It's a quality radio and is easily programmable from the FP, although the realtime environment with the RS-92 software is great.
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Craig
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I've played around with an IC-V82 with the D-STAR board installed and I wasn't that impressed with the audio quality of AMBE over IMBE. Maybe its Icom's own AMBE implementation, but it sounds way more like RealAudio 1.0 on a 28.8k modem. I know IMBE (at least in P25) can sound like that sometimes but this was way more consistent.
Mountain Wave Search & Rescue www.mwave.org
Keeping the wackers out of SAR since 1990!
KE7JFF wrote:I've played around with an IC-V82 with the D-STAR board installed and I wasn't that impressed with the audio quality of AMBE over IMBE. Maybe its Icom's own AMBE implementation, but it sounds way more like RealAudio 1.0 on a 28.8k modem. I know IMBE (at least in P25) can sound like that sometimes but this was way more consistent.
AMBE and IMBE are the codecs used for FM Digital work...P25 Phase 2 will be using AMBE+ codec I believe (will have to wait until APCO make it official).
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KE7JFF wrote:I've played around with an IC-V82 with the D-STAR board installed and I wasn't that impressed with the audio quality of AMBE over IMBE. Maybe its Icom's own AMBE implementation, but it sounds way more like RealAudio 1.0 on a 28.8k modem. I know IMBE (at least in P25) can sound like that sometimes but this was way more consistent.
AMBE and IMBE are the codecs used for FM Digital work...P25 Phase 2 will be using AMBE+ codec I believe (will have to wait until APCO make it official).
Yes, i've read about that. Will be interesting to hear any audio samples on that.
Mountain Wave Search & Rescue www.mwave.org
Keeping the wackers out of SAR since 1990!