The day I passed my Technician exam, I purchased a Yaesu FTM-7250DR to use in my car, along with a Diamond MR77 antenna. After arrival, Mike (W0VTT) assisted me with installation. I did all the crawling around, sticking hands into very poorly designed areas of my car (tight and sharp! ouch!), and with his tools and a few bits and ends, the radio was installed. Many thanks to him for the guidance (and miscellaneous odds and ends)!

I wrote down the local repeater information, frequencies, offsets, tones, and set to program the radio by hand following the manual. While I was successful, the amount of fiddling and very vague descriptions leaves something to be desired. (Edit 8/8/2020: the manual for my Kenwood TS-850S – older manuals overall – go into much more detail or are more specific about how to use particular functions). I decided that I will purchase the programming software by RT Systems (Edit 6/18/2020: the software worked excellent. The lack of support for this from Yaesu is sad. They’ll sell you a new unit in a heartbeat but won’t do a thing — updates or otherwise — about their lower end units once released).

I have not only used VHF/UHF repeaters with this rig, but also connected to my local Wires-X nodes and chatted with other hams from South America and even Puerto Rico! It is a solid first rig and I’m sure that it will last for years to come. I have no complaints about it once it is set up. The process of getting there, however, sucked. The manual sucks. Had to rely on others and YouTube videos to set it up properly.