It used to be that portable comm transceivers were bare-boned utilitarian units that served a single purpose: to talk your way down to an uneventful landing when the primary comm or electrical system failed. But there’s also an expanded role. For aircraft without electrical systems in the first place, the portable transceiver has to be reliable and rugged enough to serve as a primary radio. This means it has to have good battery endurance, enough transmit power output to talk a sizable distance (to do that, an external antenna is generally a gotta-have accessory), plus have inputs for plugging in an aviation headset so you can actually hear the receiver.
When pilots were still navigating primarily with VORs, manufacturers —including Icom with its venerable A22 portable—added VHF navigation functions to the transceiver. Sporty’s even took the interface one step further and brought the $329 SP400 to market. In addition to its full-up comm functionality, the radio has a LOC and ILS receiver for shooting an instrument approach. Awkward, compared to panel-mounted gear, but when it’s all you have, who wouldn’t use it? The way we see it, the SP400 offers just enough well-executed utility packaged around a simple user feature set. We think the price is fair, although perhaps at the threshold of many budgets.
But a new wave of modern portable transceivers takes the belt-and-suspended interface to an even higher level with built-in GPS navigation, flight plan and leg storage and wireless Bluetooth capability for connecting the radio to a smartphone app. Sounds good in theory, but it also raises a valid question: Are all these features too much for a device that needs to be simple to use in a pinch and when the workload gets high? The way we see it, you shouldn’t have to deal with a deep and complicated menu structure when the main objective is to communicate. Moreover, do all these bells and whistles even belong in a device that needs to be stone simple to use?
In the upcoming January 2018 issue of sister publication Aviation Consumer magazine, Editor Larry Anglisano set out to answer these questions and prepared a critical, detailed field report on the latest ultra-modern portable transceiver—the Icom A25N. How does the feature set compare to the bulletproof and simpler Icom A22 it replaces, and are all the additional functions worth the $550 street price? Does it make better sense to spend less and buy the comm-only A25C? Read the full report at Aviation Consumer magazine.
