SAFA Skysailor Magazine

32 SKY SAILOR January | February 2022 Out of the box Side by side, the two radios look very similar. The A16E (left) is little more compact but considerably lighter than my older model (right); 257g compared to 350g. The screen size remains unchanged and, whilst small, is adequate. The button layout is the same although the buttons now have a bit of added colour and the resulting radio looks cleaner and sharper, which may be a result of the improvement to an impressive IP67 rating. The 6 means that, wher- ever else that famous Manilla dust manages to get into, no dust will get into the radio. The 7 means that it can handle submersion in water for 30 minutes at a metre which could be handy for when the Camelbak leaks into your gear bag. The battery pack is a 2400mah Lithium-ion unit and the charger is now the same as that used by the IC-41PRO, a welcome bit of stan- dardisation. Whilst it’s not a ‘fast’ charger, it still filled an empty battery in under three and a half hours. Setting up The radio can do a lot of clever things and there are a host of settings that can be ad- justed to suit your own preferences. You will definitely need to read through the manual and decide what settings are important to you. On the whole, the manual is fairly clear and, whilst you need to cycle through options and occasionally sub options, the process is reasonably intuitive. I wanted to play with the Bluetooth connec- tion straight away. I soon had ‘Pairing’ flashing on the screen and actually had more trouble with the headset end than the radio when establishing the connection. Review: Icom IC-A16E by Martin Joyce With the increasing need to carry and use an Airband radio, I decided to look into updating my comms and move towards a Bluetooth set-up. With this in mind, I tested the modern version of my Icom A15 radio to see if it was time to update. The latest version is the IC-A16E which comes with built-in Bluetooth and, Icom kindly loaned me one to test out.