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World's Most Advanced Portable TV
Eric Schlaepfer writes "Here's another great toy for your wish list! ICOM manufactures the highly advanced IC-R3 portable scanner/television set. Besides picking up radio stations in the frequency range of 0.495-2450MHz, the IC-R3 also receives regular television signals, amateur television, and wireless security camera signals."
This TV is neither advanced, nor portable.
Only better (at 10x the price) would be the AR-one here, almost forgot ... have to be a non-US location to ship to ...
:).
Its nice to have relatives in Canada
Its sad though. I think we are one of the few industrialized nations on earth who have rescrictions on what frequencies can be listened to and when.
Many states for instance have anti-scanner laws that prohibit you from having a R3 or another scanner in your car.
And you know the cops don't want you listening in when they switch to encrypted digital repeaters.
I know it's a battery hog but as for the signal strength issue on broadcast TV reception you might want to give your R3 a better antenna. If you are particularly aiming for UHF stuff, get one of those 800 Mhz antennas.
Universal Radio and Grove Enterprises are good places to go for stuff like that.
That sounds like something my 6-year-old daughter would think. Not the part about the middle finger, but about the agency required to enforce a law being the entity that made the law. The FCC does have some leeway in the way they right specific regulations, but they work under laws passed enacted by the legislature.
Analog cellular is blocked in US receivers because of the "Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986". First, some drug dealers were caught because they made plans over the radio, somehow imagining that these radio sets were in fact secure wired phones. They argued in court the patently absurd idea that they had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Of course, they lost (except in the 9th court of appeals, of course). The rest of the stupid people thought that they should have privacy while speaking out loud in public, and rather than being mindful of what they say in public, they wanted, and got, a law making it illegal to hear what a person is saying, unless specifically addressed.
Mind, I don't care what people are talking about. I just think it's absurd that we are legally required to pretend that they aren't talking. What's next, a law barring turning your gaze at right angles to the street, so as to avoid noticing what people are doing in front of their picture windows?
Anyway, we're in agreement as to the absurdity of the law. Just don't go blaming the cops for the laws.
Being a ham radio operator (although slightly dormant at the moment) I fall for gadgets like these. I've owned a bunch of Icom's in my career. One reason to buy this product would be to bring it with me when I travel. However, it can only do either PAL or NTSC, you have to choose when you order the radio. That's just silly. There's silicone available today that could have made this a TV DX'ers dream (while jetting from one continent to the next). However, with this limitation it just doesn't make any sense to me. I guess I'll have to wait for the -R4 version...?
73,
-Kris
Another complaint I've heard about the IC-R3 is that it doesn't demodulate FM video across its entire receive range (or maybe not at all). A lot of "interesting" video is FM modulated, not AM (like broadcast TV, amateur TV, etc.) That alone would keep me from buying it, but throw in the poor sensitivity and I just don't see the point. Besides, I'm lucky enough to have an AOR AR-5000+3, so I can just add one of these and a cheap video monitor or video capture card to it and get the same functionality, albeit with less portability.