KDK FM-2025A/E Mk II reviews

The KDK 2025 Mk II was the first ham transceiver I ever owned and it got me on to 2 metres as easy as.
I still have this radio to this day, although it very rarely gets used and when it does, it's only for local simplex stuff, as you'll probably notice, it doesn't do CTCSS or any of the flash stuff we've come accustomed to radio's having these days.
The Japanese really knew how to build a good, solid transciever, though, this thing is absolutely bullet-proof!
A caveat to that though, is that the lamps in the S-meter failed a couple of years ago, so they got replaced with LED's, I'm not sure that bright blue was the right colour to use in hind-sight.
But, for a first radio, this set taught me a LOT about the basics of operating a radio on VHF, especially working simplex and the repeaters around here, as you had to manually change the split polarity.