Handheld

I guess I was old school or something, but I never had much of a desire for a handheld transceiver. Since I never met a gadget I didn't like this always struck me as being a little odd.

I always thought they were just a little too geeky, expensive and, most importantly, not terribly useful given their limited transmission range.

Then I experienced my second electrical system failure in three years. In both failures I had enough battery power remaining to get back on the ground without losing communications but in both cases I sat there wishing I had a handheld for backup.

What sealed the deal, though, was the thought of soloing students. When I soloed my first student I decided against watching from the tower and instead stood outside watching but not being able to listen to what was going on. That wasn't a great feeling and I can certainly envision heading out with a student to an uncontrolled airport, getting out and letting them take it around by themselves for a while so having some way to communicate with them is a good thing.

(When I soloed my instructor just waved a white handkerchief when he wanted me to come back in. I love the nostalgia of that approach, but prudence dictates a more, um, modern method.)

So I sprang for a handheld the other day and have been spending some time learning how to use it.

I decided on a Vertex VXA-300 Pilot III and bought it from John and Martha King. Their price was the lowest I'd seen ($240) and what the heck, maybe my order will win the airplane they give away every year. And I should be able to deduct it as a business expense, since I bought it to keep track of students in the pattern.

So far, I'm cautiously impressed.

The unit is sized just right, a little smaller than a checkbook in height and about as thick as a pack of smokes. That means it doesn't take up a whole lot of room in my flight bag but isn't so small that I have a hard time holding it in my hand.

It has both communications capability and navigation (useful in a real pinch, I suppose) plus weather channels (not terribly useful, I'm afraid.)

It feels heavy, rugged and extremely well put together. I've used other handhelds that either felt sort of cheap (Sportys) or were just huge (Bendix/King's venerable KX-99) but the Vertex is neither.

I also liked that the VXA-300 uses a more robust NiMh battery instead of the more sensitive NiCad battery in their VXA-150 communications-only radio. I'm no battery expert, but my past experience with NiCads has been that they're a bit of a pain and require a bit more planning when charging in order to get a reasonable life out of them.

Since the VXA-300 was only $10 more than the VXA-150 the decision was no-brainer.

I also liked that the Vertex shipped with a headset adaptor in the box, which is not the case with the Sporty's radio.

The headset adaptor, by the way, took some fiddling to figure out and I'm glad I tried it on the ground in the comfort of my living room rather than trying to figure it out bouncing along in the clouds.

The headset plug needs to be screwed in fully or the radio will transmit blindly. So the trick is to turn the unit off, screw the headset plug in all the way, hook up a headset and push-to-talk switch then turn everything back on.

For emergency use I'll probably leave the headset adaptor installed on the radio in my flight bag, since while it's a simple enough task on the ground it could present an unwanted distraction in the air.

The keys are on the small side and fairly close to the case surface, which means there's not very good feedback when punching in frequencies. That's not a huge deal for me, but older eyes or arthritic fingers will probably have a hard time. And forget about using the keypad with gloves on, it's just not going to happen.

There's quite a bit of capability but putting most of it into use requires some quality time with the manual. I don't find the steps required to do some things particularly intuitive.

The process for using both the navigation side and the communications side at the same time, for example, is convoluted enough that I'll probably never do it in the air, and certainly won't remember how to do it without consulting the manual.

I've been spending some quality time with the manual and there's still plenty that I don't quite understand about programming the radio.

Luckily, most of the advanced features I don't really care about. Tuning a frequency is as simple as keying it in and that's about all I'll ever do with the thing.

On the ground, I can pick up MSP tower and approach (I live about six miles away) just fine as well as the MSP VOR. Driving to the airport I started picking up Crystal's ATIS about 10 miles away and tower shortly afterward.

The sound quality is just fine, even through a headset, and plenty loud. (And yes, I looked like a total dork walking around my house with my headset on trying it out. What we won't do for science, eh?)

The radio also comes with a very nicely designed belt clip. Seriously, it's very well thought out and easy to flip the radio so it slides out, leaving the clip itself attached to your belt.

I'm not geeky enough to ever actually use the belt clip, but props to Vertex for designing a nice one.

I haven't flown with the unit yet or tried to see how well it transmits and performs in the air. That'll have to wait a bit. I need to get a night currency flight in within the next week or so and I'll probably give it a shot then.

I'm still not sure how useful the thing will actually be in an emergency but I do know that I'll at least be able to hear ATC and navigate to a VOR, so that's better than before.

I'll also bet that I'll never experience another charging system failure in my life, at least not until I forget the radio at home at which point the airplane electrics will go promptly to hell in IMC at night.