IC-7760: New High End Radio From ICOM!

 Tokyo Ham Fair had another high end radio from ICOM launched: IC-7760! Their tagline is "High Power & Clean Transmit Signal for Great Strength in Contests and DX Hunting". In one way, it is similar to my IC-2730A VHF/UHF radio. It has a separate control head and RF deck. In case of IC-2730A, the control head is meant for mounting in your car dashboard while the main part of the radio can be kept somewhere else in the car with a long connecting cable and power supply cable. Similarly, in case of IC-7760, a commercially available LAN cable can be used to connect between the remote control head and the RF deck. So you can have the RF deck closer to the antenna feed point and the control head on your table top. If you have a home Local Area Network, it is possible to operate from another room as well, without the need for an additional personal computer to interface.

A 3m long control cable is supplied with the radio, though any commercial LAN cable which is CAT5e or higher can be used, up to a maximum length of 100m. Remote placement of the RF deck provides a quite operating environment at the control head as you do not hear the noise of the cooling fan in the RF deck. LAN connectivity has to be Gigabit level, which is the current norm. LAN connections could also be through a network switch which is commonly used in Local Area Networks. IC-7760 has independent MAIN and SUB receivers, which is another similarity with my IC-2730 which is full duplex. Simultaneous reception of two signals in different bands/modes with identical performance is available. Spectrum scopes provide simultaneous display of MAIN and SUB bands. For example, you could monitor what is happening on 20m while you are having a QSO on 40m.

As in IC-7300, there is direct sampling and conversion of RF signals into digital signals. Digital signals are then processed by an FPGA or  Field Programmable Gate Array. There are a total of 15 band pass filters as in IC-7300, which attenuates out-of-band interference signals like broadcast stations, in the RF stage and prevents overflow at the Analog to Digital (A/D) converter. 200 W power output with 100% duty cycle is an important feature for modes like FT8 which needs higher duty cycle than SSB mode. Power amplifier section uses 450 W-class 65 V LDMOS-FET with a large heat sink and effective cooling system to achieve  200 W full power full duty operation, rated for continuous 1 hour transmission at ambient temperature of 25 ℃. LDMOS stands for laterally-diffused metal-oxide semiconductor. FET stands for field effect transistor. LDMOS is a planar double diffused MOSFET. RF LDMOS is widely used in cellular services for voice and data communication networks.

IC-7760 has a built-in mechanical relay type automatic internal antenna tuner, just like my FT-710 radio. As in my radio, once tuned, the matching information is automatically recalled the next time the frequency is selected, without a need for re-tuning. I have noted that in my FT-710, retuning is needed if you change the antenna as a switch from my 40/10m combination dipole to the 20-10m end fed half wave antenna. I presume that it should be like that in IC-7760 as well as matching parameters will change with change in antenna and feed line characteristics. While I am using 10m of HLF 200 cable for my EFHW, the inverted V dipole has 15m of RG 213. The balun at feed point for inverted V is 1:1 current balun while the EFHW has a 49:1 balun. All these will alter the matching parameters requiring retuning on changing the antenna. There are many more interesting features available at the ICOM web page, which you can go through at leisure.