What’s the point of the ICON 705 ?

No problem. I'd like to take a shot at addressing some of the other follow-up questions you had in other comments.

Or "it's hard to get on the air"

I think this is usually meant for QRP radios in general and I mostly disagree with the sentiment. The biggest difficulty I have had with my 705 was getting the software on my laptop to cooperate and getting certain settings correct for different modes on the radio. I consider it a familiarity problem rather than something wrong with either the radio or the computer. I was on the air and had a QSO about 30 minutes after first charging the battery, with a 'compromise' antenna no less and that was Washington to Ontario voice and 5 watts. I definitely have to be more particular about antenna selection vs when I was running a 100 watt station and it is frustrating to hear stations that can't hear me (which occurred with the 100 watt station as well, but to a lesser degree), but its not that difficult to come up with resonant and reasonably quick to deploy antenna options.

Big picture, I think antenna selection solves more problems than watts do. That said, I'm still looking at various amp options because once the antenna side is as good as it can reasonably get and there are still stations that you can hear but they can't quite copy you...watts. For my preferred use, I get by just fine with 5/10 watts. On any summit I've done so far, I get tired of talking long before I run out of people to talk to with 10 watts. At home however, I'm not concerned with the weight of anything and the whole 'just not quite reaching' some stations that I used to reach thing bugs me more. If I were staying put longer, I'd probably look at getting another radio just for home, but I expect I'll be moving again in another year or so, so an amp seems like a better fit even if the price difference isn't all that significant in some cases.

I think as far as QRP radios go, the 705 is probably the most forgiving even for people new to ham radio and that the difficulty is just the varying degrees of extra effort required to get the kinds of results that you hear other people get with little effort with more powerful radios.

/r/HamRadio Thread Parent