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Transceiver Buyers GuideFor pilots who do any amount of regular flying, especially cross-country trips or excursions over rugged terrain, a handheld transceiver is a must for the flight bag. In the last few years, the leading manufacturers, ICOM and Vertex, have packed a greater number of features into their transceivers while keeping their prices reasonable. You'll be hard-pressed to find one that costs more than $300, and you may find a model that's more than adequate for your needs in the $200 price range. First, a look at situations when a handheld transceiver can be most useful. After that, a review of several key features.A handheld transceiver can take on a vital role in emergency situations, such as the loss of panel power, but it can make everyday flying easier as well. It is a great way to pick up the latest ATIS broadcast and your IFR clearance on the ground, before you start the engine and the Hobbs meter begins ticking. It's also useful for calling up the FBO or the fuel truck, and saves draining the plane's battery. In the air, a portable transceiver takes on several useful functions. In planes with only one panel radio, it lets you or your co-pilot talk to Flight Service, pick up the destination ATIS or talk to the FBO at your arrival airport without having to leave the air traffic control frequency. If you lose electrical power or your radios go out, a handheld transceiver lets you conduct your flight without having to revert to emergency procedures. It's still smart to let air traffic controllers know you've lost your primary radio. Even if you're too far from the controller's antenna for him or her to hear you directly, chances are another plane on the same frequency will be able to hear you, and may be able to relay instructions. That's a lot better than flying blind, following your flight plan to the clearance limit and keeping an eye out for light gun signals. If you crash, a handheld radio can be a true lifesaver, helping you alert air traffic controllers and searchers to your position and condition - again, you may have to relay the message through planes passing overhead. Being able to describe your location can make it easier for rescuers to find you, especially if they otherwise would have to rely on the inaccurate signal from your old 121.5-MHz emergency locator transmitter to try to find your position. If you have a handheld GPS that's still functioning after the crash, you can use the transceiver to relay your exact coordinates. Key Transceiver Features The transceivers on the market today all provide 5 watts of transmitting power. That's about half of what most panel-mounted radios transmit, so even in the best conditions, a portable transceiver's signal won't carry as far as the signal from your panel-mounted radio does. The signal from the transceiver's whip antenna must penetrate your plane's fuselage and compete with interference from your panel's avionics stack, further reducing how far the signal can travel. A good radio will be very intelligible to the person on the other end when you call up clearance delivery on the ground and should be audible within about 10 miles of the airport when you're at pattern altitude. Both ICOM and Vertex sell models with rechargeable battery packs. These will save you the expense of alkaline batteries in the long run. But keep in mind that making lots of transmissions will wear down the battery much faster than simply monitoring a frequency. Keeping a second battery pack charged or carrying a set of alkaline batteries that you can swap is a good idea. If you're shopping the used market for a transceiver, you'll find that models just a few years old may be much smaller than the current generation of transceivers. While the compact size and light weight makes them easier to carry in a flight bag, you may find it harder to comfortably hold and operate the radio with one hand. Think about whether you'd be able to easy operate the radio's key functions with one hand, especially if you're left-handed. Models with larger keypad buttons and a backlight for both the buttons and the display can make using them much easier, cutting down on the amount of fumbling and accidental button-pressing you might do. How easily can you tell apart the primary buttons for power, volume, selecting stored frequencies and transmitting without looking at the unit? That's an important factor if you lose electrical power during a night flight and you're groping in the dark for the transceiver. Most transceivers on the market today will store between 100 and 200 different frequencies, likely far more than you'll need - especially if it takes longer to recall one of those frequencies than to just punch in the numbers on the keypad. Most radios will also let you tag stored frequencies with short alphanumeric labels: "CHINOOK APCH" instead of "133.15," for example, can make it much easier to keep track of stored frequencies. Top-of-the-line transceivers like the ICOM A24 and the Vertex Spirit and Pilot III can also tune VOR stations, showing you the radial you're on or how far off the centerline you're flying. While that sounds like a nice backup feature for navigating when your electrical system fails, in reality the VOR signal the transceiver picks up will be weakened by your plane's fuselage, often making CDI readings inaccurate and variable. Keep that in mind when flying. You may be better off declaring an emergency and requesting vectors with your handheld than using the handheld to track a VOR at your arrival airport 40 miles away. All of ICOM's and Vertex's current models include an adapter so that you can plug your headset in to your transceiver, making transmissions in a loud cockpit much easier. Depending on how your avionics stack is configured and whether you have easy access to the cable for your aircraft's external antenna, you can connect these transceivers to that antenna for better transmission range. Transceivers from ICOM ICOM has three models with only slight differences among them. The A24 can receive VOR signals and track a radial or show your course deviation, a feature that the other two ICOM models don't have. The only difference between the A6 and the A24, in fact, is the latter's ability to receive VOR signals. All three models can store up to 200 channels in groups of 20, and all let you tag channels with alphanumeric labels. The A14 lacks the "flip-flop" channel selector of the other two transceivers. While the A6 and A24 have a dedicated button to switch to 121.5 MHz, doing that on the A14 requires pressing two buttons. The A14 doesn't provide VOR tracking, but it can still receive the audio channel from a VOR, letting you pick up HIWAS and other recorded weather briefings, and also letting you monitor flight service stations that transmit through VORs. All three include a Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) rechargeable battery. Transceivers from Vertex Vertex's three transceivers have a unique optional feature that the ICOM radios do not: the ability to connect the transceiver to a computer to edit and manage stored frequencies. That's particularly helpful when adding tags (e.g. "Tower" or "Approach") since it's faster to type that on a keyboard than it is to scroll through letters one at a time on the radios themselves. The Windows software can be downloaded free from Vertex's Web site, but the pair of cables you'll need cost $80 total. As far as features go, the Pro VI is the most basic model, lacking the ability to track VOR radials that the Spirit and Pilot III have. The Spirit has a dot-matrix display that provides a higher level of resolution and clarity than the other two models. Though it's arguably more whiz-bang than a useful feature, the Spirit has a bright front-mounted LED that can be set to one of 256 colors for use in illuminating the cockpit at night or as a distress signal. The three transceivers share many features in common: all store 150 frequencies (an additional 100 frequencies are preprogrammed in memory and can't be changed, for a total of 250 stored frequencies), all allow alphanumeric frequency tagging, and all include a rechargeable battery.
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