Entel HT640
Marine VHF Radio
Contact:
Entel UK, 4 Elstree Gate, Borehamwood, Herts WD6
1JD
Tel: +44(0)20 8236 0032 Email: sales@entel.co.uk
Website: www.entel.co.uk
Entel were set up ten years ago as the UK
distributor for Standard Communications, but soon
branched out into designing and producing their own range
of communications equipment.
So far, Entel have concentrated mainly on land
based radio: the marine range consists of a single hand
held VHF - the HT640.
Smaller and slighly lighter than most, the HT640
was one of the first hand-held VHFs to benefit from
lithium-ion battery technology that is old hat in mobile
phones, but has been painfully slow to catch on for
marine VHF.
It means that the battery pack that screws onto
the back of the HT640 and which weighs just 120g (a shade
over 4 ounces) is enough to give it a nominal operating
life of 16 hours.
The basic controls are pretty obvious: there's a
rubbery knob to switch it on and adjust the volume, with
a collar around its base that sets the squelch.
Up
and down arrow keys are
used to select the channel, and the press-to-talk switch is
in the usual place on the left hand side.
So is the high-and-low power key, and
another that operates the light and keypad lock. You don't
have to be an expert to guess that the Mem key commits the
current channel to the unit's memory, or that the Scan
switches quickly between Ch 16 and whichever channels you've
told it to memorise.
What's rather less obvious is that holding
down the WX key switches the radio between international, US
and Canadian channel allocations, or that the A/B key can be
used to zip quickly between any channel you have pre-set as
channel A or B.
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