Pulled the President Lincoln II out to do the updates so I thought I'd giv ethe CRE 8900 another try to see if I could get it working. Thought I'd describe the issues I ran into here since it seems like all the CRE 8900 owners tuned in.
First off, I've tuned up my CRE 8900 to do 45 watts peak. AM deadkey is 10 watts swinging to 22 watts. If you turn down the AM deadkey to drive a amp the swing also drops off significantly. 2 watts swinging to 6 watts.
I run my mike gain at 63 on the radio (max) and set up my road devil to run about 1/3 of the way up. Loud, clear and it does a good job of noise cancelling.
The resistor on the mic is to prevent the key up issue which was described in the other thread. I haven't had any problems with my road devil sounding scratchy.
The radio size had been great, I've had mine mounted in the dash under my radio for the last year. It can get warm, especially with the way I've tuned it but no parts failures or component problems yet.
HOWEVER - on both my first unit and the current V2 unit I ran into some software glitches. Also one of the colors burned out on the V2 unit last week so I no longer have the light blue or green colors. All the rest still work.
The software glitch was basically I turned on the unit and it starts jumping between 10 meters and 11 meters and the band selector doesn't work properly. On the old radio I did 3-4 resets and then it went back to normal (although I lost my programming and had to re-program it). On the current unit it did something similar but the FUNC button stopped working which meant I couldn't access any of the secondary functions. I tried a reset but afterwards it still didn't work properly and I couldn't access the menu.
I pulled the radio out, had it sitting on my desk for a week then came back to it today and now it's working perfectly normal again. I was on the air today with it running into the Cobra XL 450 pushing 350 watts today and was making contacts left and right. Also jumped on channel 6 for fun and with around 250 watts was making contacts on the bowl in the middle of the mess
One other thing both Lil'Yeshua and I both noticed is if you turn the RF power all the way down on SSB it seems to cause a receive issue where the tone and freq change slightly...hard to describe. The RF power works on AM but it doesn't really do anything on SSB until you turn it all the way down and if you do it does the weird receive thing. I run my SSB wide open all the time anyway so not an issue but worth mentioning.
I fully expect that at some point in the next year or two my CRE 8900 will end up in the trash...not because of the radio or it's internals but because of the software and the software circuit. I think with being in the mobile in all seasons and especially the cold weather/temps that the computer just won't handle it long term. This is a pity because I really enjoyed this radio, more than just about any other radio I've tested in recent years.
While I would have liked more AM swing for playing on the bowl, for SSB it was just awesome and I got great reports from CBer's and Ham radio operators as well.
If it lasts 3 years then the cost may break down to around $125 year for most buyers and that isn't bad for me as I use a radio every day for about 2 hours a day, however I would prefer a radio to last for 10 years.
Some may say a radio should last for 20 years but for $300-400 I think 5-10 years is reasonable. I've had computers that cost $800 that only lasted 7
Once I get the fixes done on the President Lincoln II it will probably be my go-to radio (if the fixes do what they are supposed to do). But the CRE 8900 has been a great radio and I'll run it till it stops working completely.
