wow so i've just finished watching the icom ic 905 demo presentation video that icon have just released speechless absolutely speechless uh what we're going to do in this video is we're going to go through all of the features all of the functions that the radio has we're going to have a first look at the radio have a look at the rf module how that's going to operate and maybe some opinions on what icon we've done but uh just early on well done well done icon this is this is amazing so as you can see here that it's all of the vhf uhf and shf bands up to 10 gigahertz now if i just pause that back there you could see that there is cx 10 g required so there is an optional extra 410 gigahertz okay so here it is the icon ic905 144 430 1200 2400 5610 gigahertz now uh looks like all modes ssb cw fm am rooty uh dv voice digital data atv amateur television analog amateur television we'll go into that a little bit later so we mentioned again so icon mentioned this in their promotional video they say that this is the first amateur transceiver to operate in all of these bands simultaneously so here's another screenshot of the amateur television button and some of the modes that are available with the ic905 now this is an interesting one and i'll just hide myself so that you can see here the output power for this radio it is 10 watts on 2 meters 70 centimeters and 1.2 gigahertz so a little bit less than an ic 9700 obviously on the 144 and 430 megahertz bands but on 1.2 gigs 10 watts the same amount of power that you get out of an ic 9700 so that's interesting 2.4 gigahertz 2 watts and 5.6 gigahertz 2 watts as well so that's an interesting amount of power that's probably about on par with what a uh other transverters out there that you can purchase uh have 10 gigahertz will be half a watt so that's an interesting one and we'll have a look at the transverter that comes with this particular unit a little bit later on so we're looking at the head unit here this is the ic905 head unit looking at the side there we have an sd card slot at the top usb c down the bottom i'm really glad that they went usbc and not a usb micro um usb micro cables are so hard to find and they're annoying uh usbc is becoming the new standard you can also see too that there's two lan ports so they've got a lan cable port which is your local area network but then there's also a lan cable port for connection to the rf module up on top of the tower so that's very important so it looks like this will be remotable as well interesting too that it's got a heat sink on the back i'm assuming that's because this particular unit is obviously powering the rf module up on the tower so and 10 watts so that's going to require a bit of heat dissipation there's the av in and out all the other connections that you would normally find again on an ic705 power as well speaker microphone all that sort of thing so that sort of stock standard that we've already seen before on a 705 this is where it gets really interesting amateur tv in fm mode and look there's a live demo there of an analog atv amateur television picture you can also make it full screen so um analog television is possible now with the ic905 which look the the that function in itself that's not been available on any commercial unit that i know of it's always been home brew stuff home brew amateur tv transmitters and receivers that you've had to build but it looks like they've they've integrated this into a nice commercial package icon so that's great i know a lot of people might be disappointed with the fact that it's not digital amateur television because uh dvbs and stuff like that i think it's dvbs dvdt uh digital amateur television seems to be you know the future because we gave away analog television a long time ago but at the end of the day this is still pretty cool and we'll be uh not sure what the maximum resolution supported or the or anything like that but uh maybe just the icons 905 screen what it can decode the resolution probably whatever analog tvs uh standard is but uh but pretty pretty cool to be able to receive live television pictures and this just this opens up a whole new world we know with sstv and things like the international space station sends sstv maybe we could get live pictures being able to decode it off the international space station in time with with something like this who who knows it's just the the the uh the the the future is endless so i just i'm lost for words actually just how good this product is this is an interesting bit the ic905 consists of the controller and the rf module so you can see there that the the controller which is looking like the ic uh 905 unit that there is driving an rf module so all of the rf 2 meters and above 2 meters 70 centimeters 23 centimeters 2.4 5.6 and 10 they're all in that rf module sorry not 10 10's in the transfer but we'll get into that a little bit later on they're all in that rf module so very very interesting design and we could see here that what they're doing is they're using a lan cable which is connected between the rf module and the controller and this is going to be powering those rf modules from the controller up there in that top unit so here's the basic diagram of what they've they've got going on here now they say that it's a 20 meter long run of land cable that's the example that they're using they haven't specified the maximum length in this video but they're going by 20 meters which is the uh which is the the example so we can sort of go off that so basically the controller sits down the shack you run a lan cable up to the rf module at the top of the tower very very short piece of coaxial cable to the antenna and that's how you reduce coaxial cable loss so we already knew that from the shf project that that's what they were working on so they've got this diagram here too of it operating at home and also mobile or out in the field so that's pretty cool didn't didn't they've really thought this out which is which is excellent um yeah it's it's this this is a game changer in the microwave and shf field for sure so again as we mentioned it's poe technology so poe technology will be implemented which basically powers the rf module at the top of the tower and then that way they go through here and say that they can eliminate the amount of power loss that would be otherwise seen with a normal dc cable so this is also another key bit as well with that lan cable it's going to be supplied with a lan cable so i mentioned about the 20 meter length i would assume that that means that this is going to be supplied with a 20 meter length of cable that's all that we can sort of get out of that but it will be supplied with a lan cable no doubt you could probably uh make your own as well shielded shielded cable cat6 cable or something like that but it will be supplied with a cable so what do you think of the icom ic905 so far is this going to be a game changer for the ham radio community in the shf bands please let me know below okay so this is another question that a lot of you guys have been asking about and it sort of stems back to the ic 9700 talking about the frequency accuracy and stability of this unit so obviously the shf frequencies you need quite good frequency stability and accuracy so just going back through here they go through uh some examples of talking about the various drifts that can happen if you just have an oven control crystal oscillator so here's here's some examples 0.3 parts per million in 10 years that's 1.5 parts per million but at 5.6 gigahertz that means that it's going to drift 8.4 kilohertz which is outside of the pass band of ssb so that means that your free your radio will no longer be on frequency so what they've done is they have decided to go ahead with their idea of the one pulse per second clock uh gps signal which is built in and there's the antenna on the actual unit itself so they haven't gone with an external frequency input reference i kind of mentioned this in a previous video that i did about the possible drawbacks of not using an actual frequency reference and rather relying on the one pulse per second clock but it seems like they've been managed to to solve that issue and um if it if it uh if it manages to fix that then they're not well and good so that's basically the frequency stability option that is available there is no external uh input available just the internal uh input of or just the internal gps now this is the other interesting bit so this is the 10 gigahertz the cx-10g so it is a full transverter it is a optional item so this uh oh and it also comes with an antenna so they've got vertical co-linear antennas for 10 gigahertz which they are releasing um there there's there's been nothing like this at all on the market so you can see there let me just hide myself again they've got the shf the main shf module which is down the bottom here and then they've got the transverter for 10 gigahertz now there's quite a few connections on that and we'll go through that in a second and then that connects obviously to the antenna so you could either use the icon collinear which is a vertical which is probably going to get you very very short range at least on 10 gigahertz or you could pair it with a a little dish which will get you even further i find that quote interesting that they've written there shf operation will become more familiar and easier to work going forward now that that there in itself shows to me that icom are committed to amateur radio worldwide they know that the bands that are above say 1.2 gigahertz 1.2 gigahertz probably wasn't as popular until the ic 9700 or even the ic910h before it came out but since those radios were released it just become commonplace and a lot of people love experimenting and playing with 1.2 gigahertz the fact now that they're going even higher is something that i think is it's a real testament to icom in how much they are investing in amateur radio so it's going to make those bands more easier to access and it's going to be good too for hams that can't put up big antennas so if they're only interested in vhf and above and they're not interested in say hf operation or they live in an apartment or something they can put up something like this on a small mass because it doesn't take up a lot of room and it looks you know fairly innocuous really um i don't think the size of those particular units are very big so it opens up a whole new world for them as well so we already talked about the amateur television input and output so that's fine it's sd card slot usb connection so usbc it looks like optional antennas so we spoke about the 10 gigahertz band antenna but it looks like they've also got an ah24 for the 2.4 gigahertz being an ah 56 for the 5.6 gigahertz band and ah 100 for the 10 gigahertz band so you'll be able to uh get some co-linear antennas straight out of the box with this particular unit if you're liking what you're seeing with the ic905 then please hit that thumbs up and also the subscribe button as well that will help to push this video out to more and more people to hopefully discover the ic905 and the shf bands so this is now the very very interesting part this is the rf module so we can already have a look we've got four antenna connections we've got the sma type connector for 5.6 gigs the sma type for 2.4 gigs and an n-type connector for 2 meters 70 centimeters and 1.2 gigs and of course the gps antenna that we spoke about earlier as well so it looks like you'll be able to connect all of your antennas up you might require a diplexer for the to splitting off the 2 meter 70 centimeter 1.2 gigs if you want to run those all simultaneously but yeah very interesting the one thing that i kind of thought about this is that there's no not that i can see at least anyway without looking at the um we might have to wait for the technical menu or this or the specifications to come out but it doesn't look like there's any inputs or outputs for a preamp and external preamp or an external amplifier if you want more power now um arguably you could say well 2 watts is is quite a lot on 2.4 gigahertz but if you want to be able to get more power out maybe if you want to do ame um same to 5.6 gigs if you want to do eme or you want to try and get a little bit uh further distance because you need more power obviously you can hook up a higher gain antenna but yeah it doesn't look like you can hook up an external amplifier you might be able to i'm not sure we'll have to check in the specs a bit later on same two with two meters 70 and 1.2 gigs you're sort of limited to that 10 watts coming out of the rf module as well but again you've got the rf module up at the top of the the mast and a very short piece of coax to the antenna so the losses are going to be reduced quite quite substantially it's also of interest for those who are in europe as well with i think it's qo 100 geostationary satellite not sure exactly how much power you require on the uplink and downlink uh well the uplink sorry on that particular satellite the uplink is of course on 2.4 gigahertz 2 watts into maybe a high gain dish will be more than enough so this is a look at the bottom of the of the unit now i did mention again that we're not sure about preamp or other outputs such as external switching for power amplifiers but it does have an accessory port on the bottom now that's mainly i think for joining to the 10 gigahertz module it might have output switching for other maybe preamps or amplifiers we'll see what happens there's also a reference output a 10 megahertz reference output so that's interesting so they're using the one pulse per second signal out of this unit and they are generating a 10 megahertz output now i'm assuming and i think that this is correct when we move on to the 10 gigahertz unit that they're actually taking the 10 gig 10 megahertz output which is a bnc connector and they're putting that straight into the 10 gigahertz unit so they're not doing one pulse per second so um again uh robust ipx5 waterproof rating which is what you would expect for a unit outside obviously so that again another closer look here the 10 gigahertz transmitter so there's a bnc connector on it that we can see so i'm assuming that that's the 10 gig input straight in now have a look at the overall layout here of the 905 system with the remote so again we mentioned about that bnc connector so it looks like we've got a couple of connections here so we've obviously got the 10 gig antenna connection which goes up into the transverter we've also got a connection which i think is looks like the 10 megahertz input i reckon into the yeah out of the shf um module into the transverter and then we've also got the it looks like i think that's being driven so that's been driven from 2.4 gigs it looks like that port so i reckon that what they're doing is they're driving the 10 gigs transmitter from 2.4 gigahertz so that's interesting that they're not driving it from vhf or uhf because that would have made the optional um the optional 10 gigahertz transfer sort of open actually to other users it might still be not sure those maybe who have existing 2.4 gig transfers will find that interesting but that just looks like on the diagram they've got that cable coming out and into the um into the c uh what was it the cx 10g icon uk have released this particular brochure now which is the pre-release information this basically just goes over the same stuff that we saw in the video um there's i don't think anything else here that we really haven't covered again these are the the options that we've got so the accessory connector for the optional cx-10g so be interesting to see what pin outs are actually on the bottom of that no just one thing that i really really like is that icom australia is is labeled down the bottom here so icon australia if you're watching please please please we want one of these for our ham radio expo in november we really do um but not sure when it's going to be available have to keep an eye on icom america and and all of the other icon distributors here to make that announcement but well done icom japan uh just this is this is an amazing amazing achievement to be able to come out with a unit which can do uh 2 meters and above up to 10 gigs not including 3.4 gigahertz 3.4 gigahertz is actually an interesting one because i think they've left that out due to the band being taken over especially in the united states we still have a slight portion of spectrum here in australia but i can understand why that wasn't included 220 obviously as we mentioned before why that wasn't included but well done icom again proving that you really do care about amateur radio innovation um because this is just this is this is an amazing um piece of kit i'm looking forward to getting my hands on one to to play around with it to see how it integrates with my existing transverse and doing some uh tests like that so um yeah it's let's aim ever higher yeah the they've they've taken the shf project and they've actually exceeded my expectations at least so um yeah well done well done icon so what's all the hype about these microwave bands anyway the shf bands well if you click on this playlist over here to gigahertz and beyond you'll see exactly what all of the hype is about and the fun that can be had with the microwave bands