On December 10th 2016, Icom Japan opened the doors of it’s Osaka main office to the public, for the annual “Icom amateur radio festival”.
The main attraction was the prototype of the new Middle class IC-7610 HF+50MHz transceiver.
A demo unit was placed on a table, available for the attendees to be used and to be tested.
The Icom representative, declared that the model was a prototype and that some functions were not working yet or were disabled, and the software running on the demo unit was not in the final release.
The main topics that were covered during the presentation were about the technical features of this new transceiver and most of them were already declared in August 2016 during the first IC-7610 announcement.
IC-7610 is a 100 W model covering HF plus 50 MHz band.
Although it will become the successor of the IC-7600 in the middle class position, it is considerably better than the IC-7600 and it should be considered a “Model change with improved performance”.
The most important improvement, has been the shift from the conventional superheterodyne method to the “direct sampling method”.
The Icom representative said also that there is no frequency conversion, since the received signal, is directly feeded in the AD converter.
Additionally filters and digicells are inserted in both the main side and the sub side, making this receiver much better than the one on the IC-7300.
The 7610 feature two indipendent receiving circuits, allowing the “full dual watch” as implemented on the IC-7851.
The tuning of the main band and the subbands are completely independent, and different frequencies / modes can be simultaneously received.
Even two different antennas can be used at the same time, allowing also the “diversity reception”, while for the audio part, two speakers can be connected, even by dividing left and right channels with headphones.
The demo presented, along to the 7 inch LCD touch display, features a larger audio speaker, two USB ports to connect mouse and keyboard or remote control, as well as a DVI port and an SD card Slot.
According to the slides, and in comparison with other Icom transceivers, looks like this new Icom model will present receiving characteristics even better of the IC-7851.
As final statement, since ICOM did not released the product, the features presented during the demonstration are not confirmed, some more could be added and some could be changed or even removed.
IC-7610 Price and Date
The Icom representative said that the IC-7610 price has not been decided yet, but will be in the middle class range. While to those asking about when the product would have been released in Japan, has been answered early Summer 2017
Credits and source
This text has been freely translated from the original article appeared on hamlife.jp web site and it do not represent any ICOM official press release or product brochure. Pictures taken from the HamLife.Jp , visit their site for additional pictures.