Why would anyone want to review (or even read a review) of a hand-held transceiver from the 80's ?
Well, I can think of two reasons;
a) Quite a few of them were distributed in Taiwan (as well as a similar model, the IC-02AT, in South America). You can see a number of them on YouTube. This little radio is also very robust and even after 22 years, mine shows no signs of wear or perishing of the buttons - same with the others on YouTube. There are thus bound to be a few on the 2nd hand market and therefore people interested in this model.
b) This is in fact a fairly good base station. Yes, that is not a typo - I said base station. Bear with me, I'll show you why I say so in a second. But first let's look at some features.
The S-meter is pretty good, just a bit small. Blocks run from left to right on the LCD screen to indicate power out when transmitting or signal strength when receiving. The receiver is quite sensitive and I turn the squelch up to about 1/3rd, to block out noise & static - even so, S1 signals break the squelch. They clearly got this bit right.
The transceiver covers 144MHz to 146MHz, but tunes in steps. The steps can be configured to be as much as 25kHz per key press or as little as 5kHz per press. The 25kHz is fine for most repeater & experimental uses and 5kHz is not quite granular enough for any of the other uses, so I find the settings in-between redundant.
Earlier units came without external speaker microphones and listed it as a separate add-on, but later models came standard with this accessory. It is very nice - not that the built-in speaker and microphone are bad, it is just more comfortable to use the external speaker microphone. If you can get one, take it.
The speaker-microphone accessory occupies the microphone and headphone sockets at the top of the radio, so Icom have cleverly put an additional headphone socket at the bottom of the speaker-microphone accessory. It works, but is mono, as is the absolutely rubbish in-ear headset that comes with the radio.
Plugging headphones into the external speaker-microphone accessory looks weird too - rather unplug the accessory if you're going to use headphones and don't bother with the headphones that come with this radio. Mine went into the trash a long time ago and I don't miss it at all.
Remember, this radio is old - it was developed in the late 1980's or early 1990's. I got mine brand new out of the box from Taiwan in about 1992 or 1993 - I can't remember exactly when, because it was a long time ago. So some of it's shortcoming (obviously to reduce size, weight and price) are;
- Simplex only - it doesn't do duplex, so you will need to program some channels with the input & output frequencies of your local repeaters and then switch back & forth between them.
- No DTS / tones... so if your local repeater uses tones, you will have to add a tone generator to the signal somehow in order to trigger the repeater.
- It only does FM - no SSB, CW or external inputs for Digi... but I guess that is to be expected from an old portable unit.
The IC-02N has two power settings; low power puts out about 0.5W and high power puts out 5W. The half Watt is rubbish and won't get you much beyond your immediate neighbours, but trying to transmit 5W from the battery pack won't work either - see what happens when you do, in the YouTube version of this review.
Plugging the unit into DC power solves that problem - it happily transmits 5W (which pulls about 1A) and that is enough to hit most local repeaters. So put the battery pack aside and rather run the unit from DC power (as most owners of this unit seem to do). Just take note:
- You should detach the battery pack when running from an external DC source.
- Icom have put + on the inside of the socket and - on the outside - weird ! Check your cables.
- The battery pack supplies 9V, but the DC in socket takes 12V to 16V. Again, weird. Check your voltage.
Now if you're going to run your IC-02N off of an external power source with the speaker-microphone accessory, then you're not so portable any more and you might as well plug it into a decent antenna. I run mine into a quarter-wave whip on the roof, which improves the number of repeaters I can hit from 2 to all of them.
So it looks like a portable unit, but you can't fiddle with memory buttons to simulate duplex operation while driving and the battery pack does not give you enough portable power to do anything meaningful... thus what you actually end up with is a unit that looks portable, but is used primarily as a base station.
That is not a bad thing, because very few VHF base stations have the option of being unplugged, clipped to a belt and dragged onto a roof or tower to test an antenna. Base stations are usually too bulky to attach to a tripod for working satellites or scoot over to the work-bench to assist in experiments or take on SOTA outings.
With the setup above, I could easily move to the other side of the house (where the drinks are) and catch the SSTV signal below from the International Space Station (this was in 2015). By the way, the green lines are from someone down the street driving past with a noisy motorcycle - sound from the rig was perfect.
All in all, this is a good, robust, reliable little transceiver. Not so good as a portable or mobile radio, but not bad as a base station. It is also a very good starter radio for a new ham or an experimental rig used to generate test signals on the workbench. It takes a punch and if you do manage to blow it up, it probably won't be a huge loss.
