National Contest Journal Article

K1ESE

The most recent National Contest Journal has an article comparing HF Transceivers for price, performance, and satisfaction. The good news is that the Flex 6600M came out as the best performing radio.

It's an interesting article with lots of statistics. The author came up with a single score for performance by combining and weighting the Sherwood Engineering receiver performance data.

It may be that the weighting is based on statistically significant differences between radios. Those things that vary statistically may not be relevant to performance. Sensitivity, for example, may vary widely, but sensitivity beyond a certain point may not actually matter since band noise is the limiting factor in most cases. More is not better than good enough. There may be other measurements that have those same issues.

I applauded the author for trying to come up with a single score for total radio performance, but am not sure that such a number exists.

To measure satisfaction he used the average eHam Review score. It's not great but I can't think of anything better to compare radios.

Anyway, Flex had the best performance of all of them, so there...