Product Review: Icom IC-R5 Communications Receiver

Scanner listening has been a popular pastime for many radio enthusiasts since the early-70s, while the popularity of NASCAR racing and other sporting events, many of which broadcast various radio signals on location, has served to enlist an entirely new audience to the hobby. Although Radio Shack and Bearcat both have a lengthy history of offering inexpensive, high-quality scanning radios, the Icom IC-R5 communications receiver is an extremely portable and deceptively powerful all-purpose scanner and radio.

Radio frequencies surround us all the time, and most folks are only familiar with the relatively limited AM and FM radio bands. Television, however, is also a broadcast medium and the Icom IC-R5 is capable of picking up the audio portion of your local stations, a handy feature if, for instance, you lose power in a storm and want the benefit of hearing detailed, up-to-the-minute weather forecasts. Living in an area prone to tornadoes, the IC-R5 has come in handy more than once. Yes, the unit also includes the standard AM and FM radio bands as well.

A compact unit that measures roughly 2.25" by 3.50" without the screw-in antenna, the IC-R5 easily fits into a coat pocket or purse and packs a lot of features into a small radio. It operates on regular or rechargeable batteries (included) or an AC adapter (also included), and you can listen to the radio while recharging the batteries with the adapter. The unit has just a few controls that the user needs to become familiar with, and although they're a little tricky at first, they allow you to customize the radio for your listening needs. The sound quality is pretty good for such a small speaker, and the radio includes an earphone/headphone jack for private listening.

For those unfamiliar with the way a scanner works, the radio quickly "scans" a programmed range of frequencies, stopping briefly on each one as it tries to pick up a signal. If you find an interesting frequency, you can stop the scanning and listen, or you can skip the scanning altogether and just listen to familiar frequencies. The IC-R5 comes with 100 popular shortwave frequencies already programmed into the unit, including stations from such far-flung locales as Germany and England, Japan, Australia and the Netherlands. A radio hobbyist publication like Monitoring Times, available at most bookstores, offers lots of tips for picking up exotic stations and includes a monthly program list with times and related frequencies.

The IC-R5 features eighteen separate memory banks with over 1,200 programmable frequencies that also allow you to include personalized information for each channel that can be seen on the unit's LCD screen. For instance, you could program all of your local television stations into one bank for easy access, marking each with the station's call letters. The wide frequency range covered by the IC-R5 runs from 0.150 to 1309.995 MHz, minus cellular phone frequencies as mandated by federal law.

The range covered by the IC-R5 includes VHF marine channels, Citizen's Band (CB) channels, aviation frequencies, the shortwave radio band, amateur (Ham) radio and even wireless microphone frequencies like those used by fast food restaurants for their drive-through windows. The unit also allows you to select a local weather channel and includes an alert function to let you know about bad weather. Programming the radio is not all that difficult, even for the neophyte, and for the more technically-minded, optional software allows you to hook up the IC-R5 to your computer and light up all of the memory banks.

Founded in 1954, Icom is an established Japanese electronics company, an innovator and leader in producing two-way radios, scanners and professional radios for pilots and maritime use. The IC-R5 is a fun little radio that you can carry with you to sporting events, the lake, camping or just to the local mall to see what you can pick up. The IC-R5 offers the widest range of listening possibilities that you can get for less than two hundred bucks, and is perfect for either the beginner or the experienced radio hobbyist. With its features and capabilities, the Icom IC-R5 is like having half-a-dozen different radios in one small handheld unit. The radio is available from many Internet retailers like Universal Radio or Grove Enterprises.