A lot of counter's are noisey as can be and making them function quietly is quite the trick! Also many of them are driven by the CPU inthe radio and are not accurately displaying the true freq. that is being received and transmitted upon! I call them dummy freq. counter's! They are kind of like the gauges in a lot of car's are truck's! They look like old school gauges but really do not read real time they give an artificial preset indication and do not change or move unless the reading goes out of range then the CPU sends a signal to put it in the read so they are basically idiot lights that do not light up! LOL
If you want a 10 meter radio you would be hard pressed not to make the case for an RCI 2950DX! First you can get it from Copper for what $248 or so and if you left it bone stock and did not mod anything it would come out of the box working perfectly on 10m and 12m! It has all the features you need to work repeater's, beacons and the like on both bands ie dual VFO, cal function, split function, can add a tone board if you need to and so on......If you are not breaking any conventions and are not blaby you can modify it for full coverage from 24-32Mhz or something like that......It does not read real time freq either but you do have the ability to tune it to the sixth digit one digit at a time if you like not subject to segmented bands which is so 1950's if you ask me. In fact that only thing I ever hated about the HR,Presidnet Lincoln and all like chasis was their use of bands that is just far too Archy Bunker and the Honey Mooner's for me! Might as well go back to individual crystals and an external VFO!
ALmost all of the older AM/SSB Cobra and Uniden like the Grant and the 148 could be made to work on 10meters and the older 23 channel all crystal driven radio's where Super Popular for modification because they where so easy. It is not hard to find Mb 8789 no that is not right what was the PLL used in them and the RCI band selected line before then FCC made them mod it to make it hard to modify??? Any ways you can still find that Chip set in Export firmware and that makes making it a broad band radio a lot easier because it was set up to have a band switch from day one.
If you need a need an older radio might as well get one. A lot of Ham used the Uniden Grant XL before the redesign tot he LT model and would convert those to 10 meter if they wanted to go that route just keep in mind though that $248 is not a lot of cash for a radio that has all kinds of really usable feature's and dual band or more depending on how you mod it?
