A good handheld VHF?

I would like to add my support for the entel. The lithium ion battery on mine kept its charge through last winter without problems. Battery life is also good when in use and range is good. I hear some other brands are very poor at holding a charge over time.
 
I'll phone yachtbits on Monday (the way this is going they'll have a telephone call centre in Bombay)


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Hi

Take a look at the Raymarine Ray101E too. It is waterproof, was well regarded in the PBO group test and runs on NiMH rechargables that give a very good life and which you can buy in Boots when they have had their x hundred charges and die. (And alkalines too if you insist but I use NiMH for everything now and keep recharged spares around).

Mine came from Ray direct and has given great service so far.
 
I have got the Silva Star M-298.... a budget buy really (less than £50), and although there are a number of people who don't rate them I cannot see whats wrong with them. Like many others for more money it is only waterproof up to 1m for 30mins, but I imagine it is more likely to be splashproof really. It has all the features you need for a backup/grab bag/tender handheld. It has 1w or 4w power (more than some handhelds do) and the M1 and M2 channels. They usually come with the 240v and 12v charger as standard so can be charged on board aswell. I bought mine last July and gave it a full charge, and although I didn't use it an awful lot, have only recharged it last week.... it kept its charge all through the winter, but I did disconnect the battery from the main set if that makes any difference.

All in all, I am happy with what I got.
 
I've currently got a pair of these on board at the moment. Useful for going through locks, or when someone nips off to the shops, or a marina office and needs to relay a message back.

My question - how much of an overlap is there in the frequency allocation between these and a marine VHF? In other words, are there channels on which they can talk to each other?
 
Hi Karel

sorry if site was broken when you tried it. seems okay now. We don't have many problems with the site, but anyone claiming 100% reliability would not be telling the truth!

inland waterways use. I do a lot on inland waterways as a helm for the RNLI on one of their inland projects. The cluttered terrain puts even greater demands on handheld VHF's as they are essentially line of sight.

Although I personally use a Standard Horizon HX370E (basically the same as the cheaper HX270E ) but with private PMR channels), I would still recommend the Icom M71 because of its higher tranmission power.

Both units extremely robust but the M71 probably has the edge there as well. No I'm not prepared to test two to destruction!

Kev
 
Thanks for getting back to me.

I stll get the same problem on both browsers - a windoe with an error message; "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at www.aitsafe.com"

I do a lot of internet shopping - amazon, maplin, ebay - with no probs. It may be my Norton firewall, but I'm unhappy to switch that off, particularly for one site. You really should get your IT to look at this - if you hadn't been recommended here I would simply have gone somewhere else. And I'm sure a lot of others do.

I've sent you a mail with a screen-grab

I'll try phoning.
 
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