The fan made a BIG difference and for those who have not yet made that modification I highly recommend it as the constant heating and cooling of the radio may eventually cause problems. Now I can leave it on for hours at a time and it remains cool to the touch. Not wanting to drill holes in my 'new' receiver, I neatly attached the fan with double-sided carpet tape directly over the ventilation slots on the back. I stopped by the electronics parts store and picked up a 50 CFM mini-fan, and hooked it up to the 12 volt internal power supply on the radio. I did find, like some other reviewers of this radio, that it got quite warm (hot actually!) after being left on for a time. In fact I was more active on the ham bands BEFORE I got the R-7000 so I've got to stop turning it on when I get into the shack and just go right to the ham bands because if I turn the R-7000 on first I find that I have too much fun to set it aside!įor a radio that is several years old it is still very functional and fun to use. I picked up my R-7000 off Ebay a few weeks ago and have been having a ball with it ever since. Still hams and fire though, just not as much activity, we are so much more civilized now, what price liberty? They have now gone to digital encoding (P25), oh well. Oh, and I listened to the ham freqs too, less exciting, needed the 'f' filter, lots of activity though. Even more exciting when things happen in your block, behind your car, or in front of the apartment building (don't leave the apartment without listening to the scanner first, don't want to be shot at). Lots of action on LAPD frequencies back in the day, car thiefs, drug deals, shootings, car chases, helicopters, fires. But the radio just sang for years, contineous use, no airconditioning (in L.A. Many little problems could be fixed with an aftermarket program and there was a circuit 'mod' for the scan rate improvement. Used mostly to listen to public service bands as a scanner (although ICOM insisted it wasn't a 'scanner', and, in fact, it didn't have the best scanner functions, slow scan rate, small memory size, scan delay bug). Bought it as I had no hf antenna in an apartment but could get along with VHF/UHF indoor antenna. I have had this radio since new, sometime in the late 80's.

Icom r8500 review