Time for a new radio? Consider Chinese takeout...

Seven months have passed since my TYT-9800 found a home on my radio desk and I'm still basking in the warm glow of this impressive little transceiver.

The 9800 is an FM (with AM receive) quad bander that bears strong similarities to the more expensive Yaesu FT-8900. Now in its third firmware update, it's really two radios in one. The left and right sides have separate VFOs that interact when the cross-band repeater function is enabled.

My TYT-9800 in action.

Manufactured by the Tytera Corporation of Fujian, China, the TYT-9800 caught the attention of American ham operators when it was released in 2013 at a price of about $500. Now in mid-2016 it can be found at just above $200 on Amazon.com and there is a growing used market as well.

What's the big deal? The radio operates on six, ten and two meters and also the 70 cm (440 MHz) bands. The left VFO provides all four bands and receives down to 26 MHz - low enough to monitor CB channels (in AM) if you choose. The right side is VHF and UHF only, but both sides can operate outside of the amateur frequencies, making it usable for all sorts of services beside ham radio. (I'm not encouraging this, just pointing it out.)

Bring me the menu...

Like lots of new radios, the TH-9800 is menu driven - there are 42 menus to be exact, but only a handful are essential to operate the radio.

• Menu 2 lets you turn on and off the automatic repeater shift (ARS), for programming the offset on ham repeater channels;
•  Menu 4 turns off the incredibly loud beep that sounds every time you press a button or perform a function (turning this off was a no-brainer for me);
• Menu 26 is for setting scanning preferences. The default has the radio resume scanning after only five seconds, even if there is activity on a channel;
• Menus 30 and 31 are used to enable the PL or DCS tones, and encode the transmit signal for repeaters;
• Menu 35 activates the cross-band repeater, which connects the left side and right side transceivers together. It's possible to talk locally on 144 MHz and 440 MHz - the two most popular repeater bands, while cross connected to the skip-prone 10 and 6 meter bands (29 and 54 MHz.)

Front panel buttons let the user set up lots of functions - pressing and holding the "low" button toggles through the output power choices - five, 10, 20 or 50 watts (40 watts on UHF). SCN turns scanning on and off, and the center button (with the dot on it) brings up the menus.

Once you get used to the layout, it's possible to set up each memory channel and alpha tag it (six characters maximum) in a minute or two and there are 800 available memory channels.

TYT programming software.

I also ordered the programming software and proprietary USB cable which also includes a driver download. The layout is a simple spreadsheet format, allowing you to type in frequency and PL/DCS values and then upload to the radio. CHIRP software, available free on the internet, is also reported to work with the TYT-9800 and many other imported radios.

The radio has only one antenna connector, but can operate on four different bands that can require several different antennas.  My solution was to install a Comet low-loss duplexer, the CF-360, to split the signal into two paths - one is for signals below 30 MHz, and other is for everything above 50 MHz. Since I don't use six meters, it's not a problem, but in the future I may buy a duplexer that includes 50 MHz on the low end of the split rather than the high end.

73 for now, de Pete