Kenwood TR-9000 reviews

On my 5th of these radios and this has been the best yet for an old radio. Worked Germany in 2mtr contest on 1 watt via a 9 element yagi beam.
These are pretty bullet proof radio and simple to fix all componants are readily available even if not in 100% and need a bit of the old T.L.C. this one I have just bought in last two months set me back £116 the previous one was £135 + p+p. there is a base plate only to use as a power supply to hold onto memory of where you were last at on the band.The gain controls work very well and this radio outruns my modern Alinco dr130e on RX.
overall the best 2 meter rig that was produced from the late 70s till mid 80s. See one buy it getting a bit scarce now as people are not parting with them to easily nowadays.

I had one of these when they were new in the 1980's and now have another picked up recently from a rally for £25. The Trio/Kenwood is a great little rig. Legendary Trio build quality is superb and this is not a lightweight beast. I'm sure it would survive use by the army in a war zone without faltering!

By today's standards the 5 memories (which lose their contents when the power is removed from the rig) are old hat. However, they are so user friendly and easily set, which is more than I can say for today's overly complex rigs! All you do is dial in the frequency, switch to the memory channel with the dedicated knob and press save!

The rig puts out a healthy 16 watts or so and is a joy to use even after all these years. Of course this is a multimode rig and it does both upper and lower sideband, plus cw. You have 2 FM modes with different tuning steps, which give you either 25, 12.5 or 0.1kHz steps.

The one I bought recently was suffering from low output with only about half a watt on low power and about 6 watts on high. This proved only to be caused by the tx board needing a tune up of the various coils and caps in the output stage and the service manual describes this process very clearly, so in less than 40 mins it was back to full working power out.

Of course this is an old rig and doesn't have the CTCSS or DCS coding now needed for accessing repeaters, but there are add on boards that can of course be fitted if you are going to use the rig mobile.

If you see one of these going cheap, then grab yourself a bargain. Radioworld in Walsall are currently advertising a secondhand TR-9000 for £220!!!!! They do make me laugh sometimes with their prices!