Well I have now owned my IC-7000 for a little over 5 months and have decided it is time for a review.

I must say that a lot of people think the IC-7000 is a replacement for the IC-706MKIIG. This is not the case. It is a totally different radio and the only similarities between the 7000 and the 706 are its looks. The 706 continues to be sold at almost £200 less than the 7000 and is just another, all band, all mode mobile option for us the user. The 706 will continue to be sold for the foreseeable future. Although I can see the small price difference making people decide to buy the newer and 1000 times better IC-7000, so I predict some huge discounting in the future for the good ole 706.

As with most of my reviews I will get the negatives out of the way first, although the 7000 has no negatives as such, it just has a few niggles and they where hard to come by.

1st, Well the radio was 2 days short of 1 year old and it smoked. I suspected the driver board and this was later confirmed by Icom. Although a major problem I am still only going to class this as a niggle because Icom UK where extremely fast and efficient and had the radio repaired, serviced and back to me within a week. Unfortunately if you are in this hobby long enough, sooner or later a problem like this will occur. When it happens it is then you find out if you made the right choice of manufacturer or not. Icom have a 2 year warranty on the 7000 and could not apologize enough regarding my problem. And given the fast service I received I would say I made the right choice in Icom. I must point out that this problem could have been avoided if I had paid attention to a service bulletin issued by Icom regarding the ground springs on the driver board. Unfortunately I didnt check until it was to late.

2nd, Is the lack of DTMF tones via the mic, not a problem for me as I don’t use DTMF tones, but for those who do I can see this being annoying.

3rd, If I plug my straight key in to the CW socket on the rear of the 7000 using a mono plug, then I cannot use the internal keyer. For some reason plugging in a mono plug disables the internal keyer. Easy fix, replace mono plug with stereo plug.

4th, is the lack of a working SWR meter on VHF/UHF. Doesn’t bother me, as I don’t use the VHF/UHF bands too often. A point to note is that although the SWR meter will not function on VHF/UHF the SWR protection does. So rest assured you will not kill the radio due to high SWR.

Ok now on to the good things. Well to be honest, every thing that is not mentioned above is good.

The layout of the radio is fantastic, it is not cluttered and even people with large fingers would have no problems with the controls. The screen is very sharp and clear. I have even used the external video output to use my 26” LCD TV. Not a superb picture from a screen that size but still very readable. The build quality is Icoms usual high standard and the radio feels robust. The microphone has a host of features and 2 buttons can be programmed to perform a task.

When I initially heard the IC-7000 I thought something was wrong. The receive was very quiet. I switched over to my pride and joy FT-990 and I was getting S3-S5 of noise. So I scanned 20 mtrs and found a 59 signal. Tuned the Icom to the same frequency and switched the antenna over to the Icom. There was the same signal at 59 but no noise with it.

I decided to reset the CPU on the Icom so it was back to factory settings. I performed the reset and still the RX was quiet, but wait, the RX was not quiet it just didn't receive any noise. I had no DSP turned on and had the bandwidth set to 2.4Khz, the same as the 990, but the Icom received no noise compared to the 990. For around 3 hours I played with the RX filter settings and DSP on the 7000. I found it hard to believe that this little radio sounded better than any thing I had owned previously and I might add, not just a little better, but way way better.

I gave both radios a run for there money in the CQWW SSB contest at the end of October. The 7K handled the busy conditions faultlessly while on some bands the 990 struggled to the point that I couldn’t switch back to the 7k quick enough.

The Radio was very easy to use despite all the menu’s. No doubt owning previous Icoms such as the 706MKII and MKIIG as well as the IC-746 and IC-910X probably helped. Even so, if I where a newcomer to Icom I still think it would have been fairly straight forward.

The filtering on this radio is just outstanding even without all the DSP. The Dual Manual Notch is an absolute dream at getting rid of any unwanted noise on the bands. The Auto Notch gets rid of those annoying tuner carrier tones quickly and easily. The Noise Reduction does exactly that and does not compromise the RX audio to much. The Twin Passband Tuning gets rid of any adjacent frequency QRM. Not forgetting the fact that you can change the band width settings from as high as 3.6k to as low as 50Hz. You can also change whether the audio has a sharp or soft edge to it.

I have my filters set at 3.6k soft on filter 1 for fantastic RX audio that is great to listen to as long as the band isn’t to busy. During normal operation I have filter 2 set to 2.4k soft. And for operation on a busy band I have filter 3 set to 1.8k soft.

All the filter settings can be adjusted to your own parameters except the Auto Notch for obvious reasons. I must also mention that the Noise Blanker is also fully adjustable for level and width. Another mention should go to the AGC which once again can be fully adjusted from 6.0 seconds to as low as 0.1 seconds or be turned off. I have seen other reviews stating that the slow setting takes to long to reset, obviously they have not read the manual. IE you are RXing an s7 signal and you get a 30db pop, you will then not hear any of the S7 signal until the AGC goes down to the s7 level. I set my AGC to 1.6 seconds for slow, 1.2 medium and 0.3 fast.

The built in RTTY decoder works a treat the waterfall looks great. The band scope function is extremely useful as is the SWR Graphic function. Both are easy to use. The Multi Function meter is a fantastic addition.

The built in voice recorder works very well and is a great feature for a rig this size. As is the built Voice Synthesizer.

Performance on HF/50 is second to none. On VHF/UHF I found a pre amp was needed. The RX is great on VHF/UHF but for some reasons the signal meter gave a low signal reading even though the signals received sounded strong. An example of this is a local ham to me who on most of my other VHF/UHF equipment gave me an s9, on the 7k he sounded an s9 but the meter only reported an s4. Turn the pre amp on and s9.

On the TX side of things you have a great CW Keyer and you have another host of features for the TX band width. These can really help the outgoing audio. On TX audio reports where always great. On TX you can adjust the bandwidth so you TX at between 2.0 - 2.8k. I have my TX filters set as such, Wide Low 100 – Wide High 2900, Mid Low 200 – Mid High 2800 and lastly Narrow Low 300 – Narrow High 2700. These are very subtle changes but they do make a difference. I find it best to experiment with these settings as it’s more down to the frequencies in the individuals voice more than any thing else.

I wish Icom would have allowed greater scope on the TX bandwidths with some form of EQ, also the 7k has a built in Audio monitor but unfortunately this does not monitor the audio before it has gone through any filters so you do not get a representation of how you sound on the air. Never the less audio reports are always great on any band and any mode.

I am only scraping the surface of this great transceiver in this review, I would love to go into greater detail but to do so would probably take up a full page on eHam just for this review. I will probably write a full in depth review and post it on my website. No lab reports just pure real world use and the results.

Andy G7VOT