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Tel: +44 (0) 1629 581222 Fax: +44 (0) 1629 580070
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| Unit 9, Dimple Road Business Centre, Matlock, Derbyshire DE4 3JX, England Tel: +44 (0) 1629 581222 Fax: +44 (0) 1629 580070 |
Well, after a very long wait the US version of the AOR8000 has finally began shipping in the U.S. Having received one of these "street legal" (read as cellular deleted) versions of this radio, I thought I would take a few minutes and jot down my initial impressions and experiences with using the radio. This is a nontechnical review and only reflects my personal experiences in using the AOR8000. I have owned about 10 different scanners over the last few years, but this radio is absolutely the best scanner that I have seen so far. This radio was designed with the true scanner enthusiast in mind. Somebody was listening to what the scanner hobbyist wanted when the AOR8000 was designed. No, it is not perfect and has its warts, but it comes pretty darn close. This is probably not the best radio for the beginning scanner enthusiast, but could be a radio to grow into if you are patient.
The AOR8000 is a hand held scanning receiver that covers 500 kHz - 1900 MHz (less cellular). The radio has a total of 1000 memory locations that are divided into 20 banks holding 50 memory channels each. Each memory can contain the frequency, mode, attenuator setting, and a 7 character alphanumeric tag. The receiver can be operated in AM, NFM, WFM, USB, LSB, and CW modes on any frequency the radio can tune. Tuning is accomplished through either a rotary tuning knob located on top of the radio, slewing buttons on the keypad, or direct frequency entry via the keypad. Step sizes for tuning can be set anywhere from 50 Hz to 999.995 kHz. The scan/search rate is around 30 channels per second. The radio also includes 20 search banks that can be named. Up to 1000 pass channels are available for skipping unwanted frequencies when scanning or searching. There is a BandScope feature that lets you see activity on adjacent frequencies. The scan delay can be set from 0.1 to 9.9 seconds. The radio can be powered from four AA batteries or a 9 to 12V DC power source. The radio comes with 4 rechargeable nicad batteries, charger, metal belt clip, rubber ducky antenna, and a cigarette lighter adapter cable. If that’s not enough, there is also an optional RS232 interface (not available in the U.S. yet) These are just the big things, this radio has many more features that will be mentioned later on in the review.
Case The AOR8000 is basically constructed like most modern scanners. The case is a light weight plastic. Usually my first reaction to this is "Hey this thing can’t work, it’s not heavy enough!" I really prefer my radios to have some heft to them. Of course with surface mount technology everything is getting smaller and lighter. I really wish that scanners were manufactured more like amateur radio handie talkies. Amateur radio gear is typically constructed with very tough plastics that are more durable for portable use. Most of the time you can drop them a few feet onto a hard surface and they will survive. The AOR8000 does have an interesting feature in this area to help prevent dropping the radio. There are rubberized grips on the side of radio to keep the radio from slipping out of your hand if the monitoring activity gets too intense and your palms get sweaty. However, the first time you drop this puppy on the concrete, forget it! If you are going to get this radio, go ahead and spring for the leather case. On the other hand, even with the batteries and rubber duck attached the radio is very light. I like to carry my scanner inside of my jacket pocket. With the AOR8000, you will hardly know it’s there. When I have my Yaseu FT530 in my coat pocket, believe me, I know that it’s there. Sort of like carrying around a small revolver.
The tuning, on/off volume, and squelch knobs are coated with a rubberized plastic. This is a nice touch that it starting to show up on lots of radio equipment. One of the knobs on my radio was a bit loose, but seemed to stay on. The rotary tuning dial feels a bit rough, but it seems to work ok. When turning the rotary dial pretty fast, you may notice that sometimes the AOR8000 will not move to the next frequency or function right away. This can be a little disturbing at first, but is really not a problem and is mentioned in the manual. I have had a least one scanner with this feature where the rotary tuning knob would get stuck completely while tuning in one direction. Spacing between the knobs on top of the radio was also well thought out. There is more than adequate room for fat fingers.
The display is very nice. It uses a 4 line dot-matrix format that is much easier to read than conventional LCD displays. It is nice to see a display that features large easy to read numbers for a change. I always hated squinting at those little small displays that come on most scanners, especially while driving. The viewing angle is generally very good, but I wish it was a bit wider. If I lay the radio in the seat of the car, I usually will have to pick the radio up and tilt it a bit to see the display. However because of the large display and good contrast, I can read the information very quickly, hopefully avoiding rear ending the guy in front of me. The green edge lighting for the display could be a bit brighter, but is entirely adequate for night operations. The edge light can be locked on if necessary. This is very nice if you are going to use the radio in your car at night. The AOR8000 would work well for night-time mobile operation, if you have a mount that would let you tilt the radio at the appropriate angle. The combination of the large display and edge light would work out pretty well for this application.
Speaking of the display, it is covered with a large clear plastic window that is roughly even with the face of the radio. My experience with this design is that if you are not careful, you can scratch the surface very easily. Believe me, on this radio there is plenty to scratch. This might be another good reason for procuring the $29.95 leather case from AOR or a substitute.
I found the keyboard to be a delight to use. The key’s have a nice positive feel with good tactile feedback. They are large enough and spaced far enough apart that even if you have fat fingers, there is little danger of hitting more than one key at a time. The legends on the keys and on the radio body are easy to read. I have had more than one radio with skinny keys and the legends were difficult to see because of the color schemes used. There is of course the mandatory BEEP found on most scanners for keyboard input. This can get rather annoying on any radio when you are trying to enter 200 frequencies in the middle of the night with everyone else asleep. But guess what, this one can be switched off! Another very nice thing about the keyboard is that it lights up when the edge light is turned on. I have seen this on a few amateur radio handie talkies, but not on a hand held scanner or many mobile scanners for that matter. I don’t know how many times I have gotten up in the middle of the night during the worst thunderstorm of the year with all the power out. Located the scanner to see if we needed to head for the storm cellar then I would have to fumble around for a flashlight to operate the keypad. No need to do this with this radio, all I have to do now is just find the radio. The lighted keyboard also makes night time mobile operation much safer. No more trying to operate the radio by the dome light or street lights.
The special keys on the side of the radio are also lighted and somewhat recessed to avoid accidental presses. This was a nice touch also. The side mounted keys include the Function key which is used with another of the AOR8000 keypad keys to access various menus and functions of the radio. The Edge Light key, Keyboard Lock key, and the Monitor key that opens the squelch temporarily for monitoring weak signals. Overall, this is a very solid built little radio when all factors are taken to account.
This radio has some of the most flexible and useful memory management tools I have seen on any radio. The manual is necessary reading to help you understand how they can be used. I will try to discuss a few here.
My advice to anyone getting the AOR8000 is to READ THE MANUAL! I know we hate to do that, but it might avoid some confusion later. With this radio, it is best done in small chunks or referring to the manual as you need to figure out how to do something. If you read it straight through, you will probably not get a lot out of it. Speaking of the manual, I felt that it was exceptionally well written compared to what you normally get. Everything is explained in detail with good illustrations. There is even a section on antennas and propagation to help you get the most out of the radio!
Probably one of the most hateful aspects of using a scanner is entering that list of 200 or 300 frequencies that you have collected. I found this function on the AOR8000 to be a logical approach that one can very quickly adapt to and learn to love. On most scanners you had to do something like MAN-10-ENT-PROG-123.500-ENT-DELAY to get the frequency into channel 10 with the delay set. First you had to manually go through the banks to find an available channel and try to remember the available channel when you entered the new frequency. If you were sadistic enough and try to enter all 200 of your frequencies you could wind up with you fingers in a cast at the end of the day.
The AOR8000’s approach to entering frequencies is much more logical. Just type in the frequency and press ENT. Press ENT again and hold it for a second and the radio will automatically bring up the first available channel in a bank. At this time you can keep going or select a different channel or bank through the keypad or rotary tuning knob. If the channel already contains something, you will see contents flashing to let you know there is something already there. This is great, no more accidentally overwriting that rare frequency you discovered at 2 am in the morning a month ago. I don’t know how many times I have done that! You can overwrite the channel or keep going until you find the one you want. Pressing ENT again will enter the frequency into that channel and bank. Pressing ENT again will allow you to enter up to 7 characters for a channel tag. This is done by rotating the tuning knob through a selection of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation. Pressing the left and right cursor keys allows you to change position to enter the next character or edit one you messed up. When finished you press ENT and you are done. This may sound a little tedious to see it described, but in practice it is very intuitive and fast. If you mess up, you can press CLEAR or just wait 90 seconds and do not do anything, the radio will return to doing what it was doing before you made this mess. I couple of gotchas here.
The radio comes with the Mode and Step selection set to AUTO. This means when you key in a frequency, the radio will try to select the correct mode like NFM, WFM, AM, etc. and the correct step when the frequency is entered. This works well most of the time, but some of the Bandplan data contains steps that may not be appropriate for the frequency you are trying to enter. I found this out after trying to enter our local amateur radio repeater of 146.745 and after 90 seconds the frequency would change to 146.7500. You can very quickly change the step size and everything is ok after that point. I find that the alphanumeric tags are great. When you have several hundred frequencies programmed into a scanner, it is very pleasant to be able to look at the display and say "Oh yeah, that is the TACT56 channel." It also helps you remember why you stuck that frequency in to begin with! You also have the ability to some very sophisticated things like edit the channel contents. You can change the mode, frequency, attenuator, step, and tag. This will save some retyping and entry errors. There are many other things you can do with memory channels, like copy from one to another, move from one to another, and swap from one from another. I have not really found a whole lot of use for these yet, but I am sure I eventually will. You can even delete a channel! One thing that I learned was useful, was to use the feature that allows you to press the Function button just once and then select the 2nd key. To me this was much simpler than trying to keep the function button pressed while selecting the 2nd key. This makes changing modes and step sizes and such much faster. Changing modes and steps is fast and easy. All you have to do is press Function and Mode or Step and rotate through the choices in the menu with the cursor keys or the rotary tuning knob
This is a great idea in a scanner. This allows you to have two frequencies for immediate access if necessary. Some people may also find this attractive for monitoring duplex communications. Each VFO can be set to and individual frequency, mode, and step. They may be very quickly toggled back and forth. Most amateur radio gear has this feature. It is finally nice to see it show up in a hand held scanner.
The AOR has a total of 20 banks each holding 50 channels. This is a great idea! Most scanners I used had something like 10 banks of 20 channels or 10 banks of 100 channels. The 10x20 and 10x100 models were always frustrating when trying to set your scanner up by service type. When I had 45 aircraft channels to program, I would windup having to have 20 in one bank, 20 in another and 5 in another. Well I always felt that I hated to take up a 20 channel bank with only five channels, so I would usually leave them out. The 10x100 was not as bad, but I would usually like to have more than 10 banks to organize frequencies in.
The AOR8000’s 20x50 arrangement is just about perfect. There are plenty of banks and channels to organize your frequencies. The banks are labelled A-J and a-j. The lowercase banks can be passworded to keep out prying eyes and fingers. I have not really used this, but some people may find it useful. The AOR8000 uses an idea called bank linking. Most scanners do this in some way, but AOR’s way is quite good. Most scanners allow you to add or remove banks from being scanned by pressing the number of the bank you want or do not want to scan. On the AOR8000, you turn the linking feature on and then key in the banks you want to link together for scanning. For example you could scan banks ADGH by entering them into the scan list. If you want to scan a bank that is not in the list, just press its letter from the keypad. For example, I want to temporarily disable the ADGH scan and want to scan just bank B. I simply press B on the keypad. To go back to the linked scan, I press one of the linked bank letters. The bank linking feature can be turned totally off and the radio will scan just the selected bank. This setup may be a little strange if you are used to using GRE and Uniden designed radios, but the more I use it the more I like it. This allows me to do something like link all the public service banks together and not link the bank that contains 2 Meter repeaters. If I decide I want to check activity on the repeaters, I just press the letter of the bank that contains them. The radio stops its linked scan and then goes to the repeater bank to check for activity. If it is boring, I can quickly switch back to my normal linked scanning. There is also a feature to let you delete an entire bank of channels (kind of scary).
One thing I really like about the AOR8000 is when you turn it on, it goes back to doing what it was doing when you turned it off. If you were scanning it goes back to scanning, if you were monitoring NOAA on one of the VFOs, it goes back to monitoring NOAA when turned on. The AOR8000 clips along at about 30 channels per second. Not bad. What I really like about this scanner opposed to most of the models I have used is that it only scans channels that contain frequencies. Most scanners I have seen, usually scan all the channels in a bank. This means if you do not want to scan the empty channels, you have to lock them out. This makes for real fun if you have a lockout review feature and just want to find that one channel that you locked out. Speaking of lockout, AOR calls this feature a PASS channel. If you are scanning and have a channel with some annoying chatter or static, you simply press PASS and the channel is locked out. I like the way that AOR does this. On a passed channel a small p shows up next to the channel number and makes it very easy to see that this channel has been locked out. To un-PASS the channel, just go back to it and press PASS again. To start scanning you press the SCAN button. If you need to hold the scanner on an interesting frequency, you simply press the ENT key. To go back to scanning, just press the Scan key again. I find this to be a very simple way of doing this.
Of course channels can be recalled manually via the keypad or stepped through manually with the rotary tuning knob. Stepping through the frequencies with the manual tuning knob is a feature I have always found handy. The AOR8000 of course has a Priority channel that can be set to any one of the 1000 channels. Another very useful feature is the ability to build a favorite channel list from the frequencies stored in the banks and scan just those frequencies. AOR calls this feature select scan. This is a really handy feature. Let us say an event is taking place that you would like to monitor. As the various radio services become active during the event, you can add them to the scan list at the press of a button. When you feel that you got all of them you want to monitor, just turn the select scan feature on. Now you are only scanning the frequencies that are in that list. Neat! Once you are through, the whole list may be deleted.
The AOR8000 also lets you customize your scanning in the Expert mode by adjusting the scan delay from .1 to 9.9 seconds. This is nice for monitoring trunked systems, or just lengthening the pause time. The default in the New User mode is 2 seconds. I have not found a way to apply the delay to individual channels, which would be nice. An Audio Scan feature will let you scan only frequencies that contain audio. This allows the radio to pass over open carriers and such. This feature has been around for a while on the
PRO-2006 is called Sound Squelch. I am not sure how useful this really is because if the person transmitting is slow to start talking, the radio may skip that channel.
The Free Scan feature is typically found in most amateur radio gear. This allows you to set a time limit from 00 to 99 seconds for the scanner to dwell on any given frequency. When the time limit has expired, the scanner moves onto the next channel. This is not too useful for scanning, but good for getting a picture of activity on the channels. The Scan Level setting allows you to set the squelch level required before the squelch will open. This setting is from 0 to 7. This is very nice for not allowing very weak signals or noisy channels from opening the squelch. I am reluctant to use this feature, because I am afraid I would miss that important transmission that was only at S1. Users who live in strong signal areas or high intermod areas may find this feature very useful. You can also select the Scan Mode. This allows you to mix frequencies with different modes in a bank and have the scanner just scan the ones of a certain mode. For example you could have Aircraft AM frequencies mixed with NFM frequencies in a bank. By using this setting you could just scan the AM frequencies or just the NFM frequencies.
This radio has to be the stealth bomber of radios for finding new frequencies! Several search methods are available to you. One of the simplest is to search between two VFO frequencies. This is nice for setting up a really quick and dirty search. You can set up 20 different search banks. You program the starting and ending frequency, step, attenuator, and mode. Having 20 of these rascals gives you more room to have very specific search ranges. Some radios give you 10, which I have usually found adequate, but with 20 you can specify smaller chunks of spectrum to be searched. These search banks can also be named, which is a nice touch. This allows you to put tags on them like 2 Meter, 70 CM, AIR MIL, etc. One huge problem that I have always disliked in searching frequency ranges is that there is always going to be spurs, birdies, open carriers, noise, and gosh knows what else. I have to pay attention to the radio constantly when it is searching. I am always tied to the radio pushing a button to get past these frequencies. When I did find one I want to keep, I would usually hit the Monitor button to store it and then move it into a memory channel later. Most of the scanners I used only had 10 of these monitor channels, so eventually I would have to stop searching and move the frequencies I found into memory
AOR solves these problems nicely. To get around the problem of the scanner stopping on junk frequencies, you can lock out the offending little rascals with the Pass key (do not worry you can Un-Pass them if need be). You can have up to 1000 of these locked out (50 for each bank) and it will even check to make sure that you did not lock out the same one twice. Now you can just sit back and let the AOR8000 do its thing. When a frequency is found all, you have to do is press the ENT key for a couple of seconds and you are ready to enter it into a bank and channel. If that is not enough, you can link the 20 search banks together much like you can the scan banks.
For example, you go to a new city and you want to see what is happening on the 2 Meter and AIR MIL banks, you can link the two search banks and the radio will search them for you. Slick! No more having to search the ranges one at a time or wasting time
searching large chunks of spectrum to find those choice frequencies. Now the icing on the cake! The AOR8000 will even Auto Store these frequencies for you into Bank J while you go out and have a nice dinner. The AOR8000 will store the first 50 active frequencies that it finds in the search ranges you have linked. My experience with Auto Storing scanners in the past has been dismal. One scanner I had that had this feature had so much intermod and so many birdies that the first 20 to 30 frequencies it stored was garbage. If I were lucky, I might get 10 or so good ones. With the ability to Pass offending frequencies and link search ranges, you now have very effective tools for finding new frequencies. Some of the same features that are available for scanning, are also available for searching.
I found the Scan Level setting very effective in keeping the radio from stopping on and storing a frequency that was activated by some weak stray RF. For example, at one location the heating system would generate a small pop in the scanner’s circuits. The scanner would think that it was a valid signal and try to store it. By setting the Scan Level to 3, the radio would ignore it. You can also use the Audio feature to bypass open carriers. Here again, there are other parameters that can be tweaked to make the search even tighter. Once you have captured some good frequencies, you can copy them to other banks and channels. You can even dump bank J when you are finished and start over. Another way this feature can be used is to Pass the frequencies in the search ranges that you already know about or have stored in the scanner. This way, you will only be finding new frequencies for your area.
This feature lets you see frequency activity on either side of the center frequency to which you are listening. The BandScope is made up of 11 bars with the 6th being the center frequency. The bars on the left and right of the 6th bar will show activity 3 kHz from the center frequency for USB, LSB, and CW. For AM and FM, the offset is 10 kHz. This feature can be switched off or on. It seems to work reasonably well. The only penalty is that the audio on the center channel is interrupted every 5 seconds so the scanner can go check activity on the other 10 channels and update the display. I am not sure exactly how useful this, but I am sure that some users will find ways to put it to use.
VHF/UHF Sensitivity on VHF/UHF is nothing short of superb. I have had frequencies plugged into my old hand held scanner that I never heard a peep out of. On the AOR8000 these weak frequencies sprang to life. I didn’t realize that some of these channels were even active anymore ! Of course I was using both of these radio’s with rubber ducky antennas. Speaking of rubber duckies. The one that is provided with the AOR8000 is apparently pretty broad banded. I noticed a major improvement in reception quality by switching to a rubber ducky that was tuned for a narrower chunk of bandwidth.
The AOR8000 includes a S meter to help you determine if a given antenna is performing better than another. This is something I think would be handy on all scanners and should be standard equipment. One of the area’s I have often seen some sensitivity problems with most other scanners is in the low VHF bands. I realize that part of this is due to the short antennas provided with hand held scanners, but the AOR8000 seems to do very well here. This is the only hand held scanner I have had that will actually receive strong VHF/UHF signals with the antenna removed. One of the problems associated with sensitive radios is usually intermod. I have not heard a bit of intermod on the AOR8000 even on a full sized antenna (your mileage may vary) and we have some killer paging services around here. Any radio around here without a tight front end will get blasted by these paging systems. The AOR8000 just quietly scans along until a real signal opens the squelch. These paging systems used to drive me nuts, even when I used a PRO-2006 which is very good at intermod rejection. By the way, this radio is also fairly free of birdies and images on VHF/UHF. You will find some as you would with most scanners, but they are noticeably less on the AOR8000.
Sensitivity in the FM broadcast band is very good also but if you use a large external antenna, selectivity suffers some in the WFM mode. You may have trouble separating a weak station next to a very strong FM station. This is not much of a problem with whip antennas. The squelch action on the AOR8000 seems to be very good, it is easy to set and you really don’t have to fool with it much once it is set. One of the major strengths of this radio is the ability to operate in any mode on any frequency the radio supports. This opens up new monitoring opportunities on VHF/UHF for some users like Military Air, Milsat, 2Meter SSB, 70 CM SSB, 6 Meter SSB, TV Audio, just to name a few (maybe even frequency inversion ?).
Medium wave AM is not too good. It will allow you to receive some of your strong local broadcasters ok, but you can forget about DX. Of course the manual tells you this up-front, so there are no surprises here. The radio contains a ferrite bar antenna for Medium Wave. You sometimes can improve reception by rotating the radio for the best signal strength.
Ah, this is always the controversial area for this type of radio. The bottom line is, that I was surprised that it worked as well as it does. Don’t get me wrong, this is no Drake R8 or even a Sony 7600G for that matter. If you are an avid shortwave program listener or utility Dxer, you would be much happier elsewhere. However, shortwave on the AOR8000 works and it works fairly well at that. The radio has plenty of sensitivity in these bands, but suffers from a lack of selectivity. In other words if you are trying to pick out a weak station between two strong stations, forget it. However, if your goal is to have a radio that is an excellent scanner and just happens to pick up the BBC, then go for it. I found that I had no trouble in picking up a few strong shortwave stations on a Radio Shack collapsible whip. Connecting up a large outdoor antenna brought in even more, and surprisingly, the radio did not overload. If it does, you always have the 10db attenuator to help. You may even hear some faint images from very strong signals on other bands bleeding through occasionally when using a large outdoor antenna.
The manual with the AOR8000 offers an explanation of some of the devices that you could use to enhance listening on the shortwave bands. I felt that utility and amateur reception on the AOR8000 was fair to good. Here again, using a very large outside antenna may make it difficult to isolate weak signals from very strong ones. I have heard some users say that they could not get the "duck" tuned out on SSB. My experience is that yes you can. You may have tune off frequency a few kHz to do it. Of course this was not all that unusual with even some of the higher end radios I have used. The AOR8000 frequency display on SSB seems to be relatively accurate. The only major complaint I have here, is that band surfing is a little tedious with the rotary tuning knob or the slewing buttons on the keypad. There is no variable rate of tuning like on some radios, unless you want to count how fast you can turn the rotary tuning knob. The slewing buttons always work at the same speed even when held down. The trick I have learned to get buy this is to set the step size larger than you normally would use. When you get close to something interesting, decrease the step size. I will admit, that it’s nice to have a radio that when you get tired of scanning, you can flip over to the BBC or monitor one of your favorite amateur radio nets.
The AOR8000 has plenty of audio that is a bit on the bassy side. I prefer this sound personally, it doesn’t get on my nerves as much as some of the tinnier radios. What I mean by plenty of audio, is that you can generally hear this radio over the background noise of a moving car with one window rolled down. If your car has dual cherry bomb exhausts then I am wrong, there isn’t much audio. However, I find this radio to much louder than most scanners and amateur radio Hts that I have used lately. Audio quality on WFM is pretty good, but you are not going to get a full rich sound through the built in speaker. SSB is a bit tinny, but acceptable. I have tried an external speaker and there is a major improvement in audio quality in all the modes.
Battery life seems to quite good. There is also a power saving feature than can be enabled to further extend battery life. When the battery starts going south, you will see a large Low Battery label flashing on the screen. When using the rechargeable nicad batteries, the Low Battery indicator will flash for awhile and then the radio will go silent. When using alkalines, the Low Battery indicator will flash, but you will also start to hear some weird heterodyning and audio distortion. The first time this happened, I thought the thing had broke. A fresh set of batteries solved the problem. One good thing is that the memory data is stored in such a way that it can not be lost due to dead batteries.
The AOR8000 also has some interesting features available in the EXPERT mode like changing the PLL lockup time, the time it takes for the squelch to lock up, the length and level of audio needed when using the audio squelch features, and the length of time for the squelch to activate if the signal level search or scan modes are used. These allow the user to tweak the radio for better or more reliable performance in certain applications. I think I will stay away from these for awhile.
There is a provision for an optional computer interface on the AOR8000. I have not had the opportunity to use this function yet, but I
understand that it will allow you to control most of the functions of the radio via the computer. I have heard it’s pretty good compared to even some of those available on higher end radios. This makes sense because a lot of these interfaces were simply an afterthought and not really integrated that well into the radio. One interesting thing that I have noticed is that RF generated from my computer equipment doesn’t tear up reception on this radio as bad (VHF/UHF bands) as most of the other scanners and Hts I have used. However, you will still get some noise on some frequencies from computer generated RF. I wonder if AOR put a little more shielding than normal in this radio. I guess this would be important if you were going to connect the thing to a computer. I am sure as these interfaces become more prevalent, neat and nifty software will start to appear to enhance the utility of this radio even further. We may even start to see users sharing their frequency information across the Internet by posting AOR8000 compatible frequency files !
The more I use this radio, the more I begin to appreciate the thought that went into the design of this unit. It is a very versatile and flexible piece of radio gear that will appeal to the seasoned as well as the novice scanner enthusiast. It appears to me that a lot of thought went into what scanner enthusiasts would like and need and was poured into the AOR8000. I am sure that as this radio proliferates among the scanner enthusiasts, that we will be seeing all kinds of new applications and ways to use this radio. In my opinion, the AOR8000 has the potential to rise up to the cult status achieved by such scanners as the PRO-43, PRO-2006, AOR1000, and maybe even the R7100.
These opinions and views are strictly my own and do not reflect those of my employer. I have no association with AOR or EDCO outside of being a pleased AOR8000 owner.
Notes: This review has been reprinted by AOR (UK) LTD as an owner's non technical appraisal of the AR8000, the text has not been edited in any way. The UK version is supplied with automode bandplan data appropriate to the UK, no cellular block (it receives right through the range) and UK charger plus quick start guide. The SC8000 soft case and CU8232 are already available in the UK.
The tuning control speed may be increased by a factor of x 10 by pressing the FUNCTION KEY while tuning, this eases the location of transmissions especially when tuning on shortwave amateur bands.
AOR (UK) LTD, 4E East Mill, Bridgefoot, Belper, Derbys DE56 2UA, England.
Tel: +44 (1)773 880788 Fax: +44 (1)773 880780 e-mail: info@aoruk.com Jan '95
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