Forgot about that one...

Stupid on my part, too...I now remember drooling over that radio back in the days before I got my old-skool Tech license. It's been a while...

Whether or not the ricebox makers will come up with an HT that can do multimode or not, though...now that's a question. It seems that much of their efforts in multimode VHF/UHF as of late has been concentrated in high-priced base units for satellite work. And not to detract anything from people doing satellite, but there is a certain rush in going out to B.F. Nowhere with a QRP-ish SSB rig and seeing what sort of DX you can shoot in a good opening. And this is really going unaddressed, save for _perhaps_ by the Yaesu FT290/etcR mkII, which can be run off of a battery pack in low power. I see no reason why, if a maker like Alinco can cram a perfectly good dualbander down to something the size of a credit-card (and these things _do work_...bet!), that someone can't come up with a good portable multimode.

But yeah...now I recall that Santec. It's from the same vintage as that Icom IC-551 (I think?) that one could get for some serious portable-ish 6M work on SSB. Amazing to me how that whole line of thinking just went The Way Of All Things. Not too ingenious, methinks.