He needs to transmit. Basic requirement for the radio is to check with aircraft if they have anything for him vs straight monitoring as all his necessities come by air. For example, its been below zero for the past week and to make a run up to the runway would require a preheat to the snow machine to see if they dropped anything off for him before it froze. While its possible to coordinate at times with a phone call, usually its there's a weather window and they include his stuff in a flight to other locations and drop it off. And to add, noise or grass cutting are usually not an issue when the snow is gone and we did have an external antenna set for his previous Motorola.
There are multiple radios to pick from. But you might have him look at Sporty's PJ2 for simplicity and cost.
Do you have any experience with the Yaesu FTA-250L? It and the PJ2+ appear to be the front runners with the only real difference the PJ2+ lacks built in battery charging.
Yeasu's are generally very reliable and high quality. The only con, especially for the smaller form factor radios, is the menu structure can be non-intuitive.
Do you find changing between 3 programmed frequencies in the radio to be difficult? Is there a "last freq" button or scroll button?
You can program it so you can scroll between frequencies. It's setting it up to do that which takes time. Once it's done, easy to use.
No, I don't have much experience with the Yaesu. A friend had one and liked it, but he was a "techie" and mentioned the User Interface (menus) were not designed real well.
Once I get the top 2 selected will bring up that and a few others things up with him to see where his priority is.
He wants new. I believe the Icom A16 is the current version? Is there something worth the $100+ for an Icom over the PJ2+ or 250L?
Not sure it's worth paying for new in his use case, but it's his choice.
One thing Icoms have is proven durability and reliability.
