In August 2009, I bought a Yaesu VR-500 — a pocket-sized all-mode radio receiver with continuous coverage from 100 kHz up to 1.3 GHz. My previous travel radio was a Sony ICF-SW22, which only did AM on shortwave and didn't have digital tuning. Here are my impressions after a few months' use of the VR-500.
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Surprisingly good sound from the built-in speaker. A simple audio filter (e.g. as the ICF-SW22 has) would be useful for noisy signals, though.
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A software bug: scrolling with the side button held down on the
STEPscreen does very odd things! -
In "busy search" mode, the radio will sit on a frequency for 2s after the squelch has closed. This time should be configurable (as the "pause search" time is); it's a bit short by default.
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RF squelch is much more useful than AF squelch, but it would be nice to be able to adjust it more easily. Maybe by rotating the tuning knob with the monitor button held down?
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Per-preset — or at least per-band — RF squelch would be useful.
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A "light up when squelch is open" mode would be nice.
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Entering labels using the alpha keys isn't quite as straightforward as on a Nokia phone; it should advance to a new letter after a delay, etc.
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Not being able to see the last digit (which is either 0 or 5) of the frequency is a bit of a pain. This is important for the UK CB and PMR446 bands.
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The manual doesn't say what size the power connector is (it's 1.7mm/4.0mm).
So, in general, the hardware is very nice — but I wish the firmware were open source!
The radio has a TTL serial interface on the ring of its speaker socket that can be used to dump and restore its memory. I built a MAX232-based adaptor to connect it to a PC's serial port.
Bob Parnass' tk500 provides a Tk-based interface for editing the VR-500's memories and communicating with the radio. I found that tk500 1.5 didn't save the invisible last digit of the frequency, and didn't clear the priority flag when importing a CSV file. I've written a patch to correct both of these problems. See the comments in the patch for details of how the last digit is actually stored in the radio's memory.