The news is out the new Icom IC 7760 is out with a bit of a lunch bag letdown feeling among hams. As Rob Sherwood put in on the 7610 groups io site:
"Unless I am missing something, why would I "upgrade" from a 7610 to a 7760? With minimal details at this point, why would the lab numbers be noticeably better?"
Some of the highlights are:
A separate control head from the RF deck. This is nice to see and you can move the rig around the house but the specs say it requires a gigabit Ethernet connection to function.
200 watts power output.
15 separated bandpass filters. (7610 has 13)
The addition of a 2.4-inch sub-display for filter display or band stacking and so on.
A preset FT8 menu for the Digi fans.
4 antenna inputs. (7610 has 2)
Other than a few other minor stuff it basically is a 7610 but for double the price. But if an extra 100 watts, 2 extra bandpass filters, 2 extra antenna ports and an easy FT8 setup rev's your engine then the extra money is well spent I guess.
Here is the link from Icom with all the details and you can judge for yourself.
Icom IC 7760
2 comments:
I agree. From a contesters viewpoint, the things that matter are adjacent channel dynamic range, and reciprocal mixing performance. You can increase the former by having more bits in the A-D converter, but I'm not aware of any 18 bit A-D for direct sampling at a reasonable price, or you can increase the oversampling rate and then the decimation factor, but again, that would require a much faster FPGA and I'm not aware of any improvements in this area either. As for RM, that would require an improvement in the jitter of the sample clock, and we are already at the limits here. So, it would seem as if this is a 'tarted-up 7610'. OK, the ability to use the Digi-Sel with the pre-amps might be useful, but for me in Cyprus with our relatively benign RF environment Dig-Sel makes little difference. A 200W PA using high voltage FETS with DPD is a welcome feature, long overdue, but again, the latest '7610 firmware applies DPD to the existing low voltage PA with a significant improvement in IMDs. So unless there is some dramatically new technology inside, I'm not expecting any real change in performance.
Yes, it's quite a disappointment after all the speculation over the last few months. I was hoping for something like a TS-990S killer.
Still, if nothing else, it reaffirms the amazing value provided by the mighty 7610.
73, Tom M7MCQ
www.m7mcq.com
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