I was lucky enough to receive a Yaesu FT-991A as a gift from family over the holidays, and has been my main and only means of accessing HF since getting my license - well, the little bit of ten meter I’m allowed to access as a technician. For what the radio is, it preforms really well, and I haven’t had any issues. However, growing up with the technology I did, I sort of, expect more from my equipment?

Start with the Good

Don’t get me wrong, the radio does exactly what it says on the tin, and is a really capable shack-in-a-box radio. It features a waterfall display with adjustable width to help you find stations, three RX amplification stages you can select between, noise filters, recorded messages for SSB, the USB interface for digital operations, and so on. It’s able to transmit up to 100W power, which is more than enough to really hit far, especially using FT8. It’s a good solid radio, with plenty of buttons and settings, and it works exactly as you’d need it to.

One Track Mind

The first, albeit minor, gripe I have with the radio boils down to this; it can only do a single thing at once. Even cheap radios on Amazon offer dual monitoring, and considering this is an SDR radio, the fact that you’re stuck to a single station at once is just a bit of an annoyance. Would be nice to just leave it monitoring 2M calling frequency as well as the club repeater when I’m not doing operations, rather than needing another dedicated radio for that.

Why is it not a Computer?

This goes back to my expectations with the technology I grew up with, but why is this not bascially a computer? Seriously though. In my opinion, you should be able to connect a keyboard to this, and do FT8, WinLink, SSTV, etc. all without requiring a secondary device. Now, I don’t know when this was designed, so I could be being entirely unfair to Yaesu right now, but microprocessors are in everything these days with more than enough processing power to handle this.