Fexdain FDC450A review

The place to discuss Commercial & Private licensed hand held & mobile transceivers, as well as imported hand held and mobile transceivers.
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overlandadventures
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Joined: 30 Jun 2008, 07:25

Fexdain FDC450A review

Post by overlandadventures »

I have just sourced a couple of these for an upcoming charity trip to Africa, last year they kept 9 Land Rovers together using PMR446 radios bought from a motorway services, they were suitably dissapointed.
This year they wanted something better, but being for charity they needed something cheap, they had played with my px777's previously and were happy to entrust me to find some radios for them.
I picked the FDC450A as it was the cheapest 4w handy I could find on 409 shop ($56.80) the review on some of the ham sites were excellent so I took the plunge.

On there arrival I was pleasantly suprised by the quality feel out of the box, and to be honest they felt better built and less plasticy than the 777's I own.
I had expected to use my px programming lead along with the free programming software on the web. The plug layout on the side is different to the puxing/ kenwood layout with the pins much closer together. :( I now had to program them by hand.
I was shocked how quickly I managed it, I put in 18 channels in each radio, including ctcss and dcs tones in under 10 minutes. The instructions were easy to follow and in good English.
Once up and running the tx and rx audio was tried -not over any great distance but sounded fine, the local busineses using 446 were just as audable as on the px777. On the whole a good experience.
Would I buy some? well no I'd stick with a puxing 777/888/vev1000 mainly because I would want retro compatability with my older stuff, I would also want alpha tagging of the channels, not just a channel number display.
Are they a good radio for the price -hell yes, nice feel, 4w's no frills well worth a look
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