Order A FTDX10 - Giga Parts and HRO

I called Giga Parts and HRO today on placing an order for the FTDX10 but did not go ahead cause they wanted the full price of the radio down as the deposit not the customary $50 or $100 down. I would like to by this radio but I don't want my Credit card billed until they ship this radio, I would also place more deposit moneys down but it seems like the big retailers are getting like Flex and Elecraft were the want at least half the money down or paid in full if you want to be low on there list when the actual purchase date could be months or a year away. I asked how many orders they have now and there reply was not so many, maybe two or three.

No thank you I will wait till there in stock and maybe by then the price might go down if they wanna be competitive with Icom although if the FTDX10's RX spec are like what they are stating this radio will best the Icom by allot!

feedback ::

Interesting, perhaps the demand is lower than folks would think, and thus the full cost, or the delivery's are expected soon, and thy don't want to mess around with deposits. If it meets their spec, by ARRL, Sherwood, RSGB... it will be a real winner. The basic receiver will be better than many of the more expensive direct samplers for locations like field day, or a contest station with multiple rigs on at once. This on paper meets the specs of the K3S, but only for one RX. The ADC chips for the direct samplers have a 20dB pre-amp in the chip which allows really good sensitivity, but lowers the dynamic range. I have a QS1R direct sampling receiver from 2008, at that time the LTC2208 did not include the pre-amp. and the rig worked really well co located at a field day site some years ago 20dB can make a big difference on Dynamic Range. I need to run an external pre-amp to hear things on the higher bands. Most all of the LTC series chips has the pre-amp now, so methods of attenuation are needed when you get close to ADC clipping.

I am looking forward to the FTDX10, while the scope on other rigs may be better at this time, that they more closely represent a professional spectrum analyzer it will still give a representation of the signal. The 3d scope may be beneficial in analyzing band fading, if the timing can be slowed down. What I would like on the 2D scope is a way to represent the signal as just a line, with no fill. Not sure if it is capable of that or not. The 7610, 7300, Flex and K4 are. For the money the FTDX10 looks to be a good balance of features with really good performance. There are some detail questions, such as the QSK switching on CW, audio quality of received audio, AM receive filtering (would be good if there would be an array of DSP filters, and the ability to select the sideband to mitigate QRM on one side) ICOM has this ability on their radios using the twin pass band tuning to shift to one side. Most other rigs have DSP filters of some kind for AM mode.

I am not sure if this is direct competition for the 7300, as it is more of a general purpose rig, with really good performance for the cost,where FTDX10 looks to be positioned as a high performance portable rig, like K3, and TS-590SG, and their older FTDX3000.