Shack, why did you leave us?

After Sherrie passed the exam, we wanted a second full-featured radio. We found a solution in Radio Shack's purge as it abandoned its namesake product for phones and gadgets. For a bargain price, we bought this 2-meter and 440 unit, along with the promise of spare batteries. It also came with a a holder that would let us use 4 "AA" cells.

The HTX-420 is incredibly well-built. It was no surprise to find out that there's a Yahoo group dedicated to this and other, even older, radios of this series.

Although the HTX-420 uses a keyboard for entry (and there is no computer option), you have to enter a new frequency into a non-memoy slot, then tell it to save, and turn the knob to the memory spot you want to use and save it there. It is a somewhat cumbersome procedure that has caused us to set the middle-numbered memory slots and leave them alone, changing the ones in 90-100 and 1-10. Like the HTX-200, this radio is not as smart as the FT50--you'll have to tell it if repeater offset is + or -, for one. On the other hand, you can quickly and easily change, for each memory slot, the squelch level, offset, tone, and other settings. The readout is large enough to be seen easily. However, there is no alphanumeric setting. Thus we take with us a list of frequences and what they are.

We also bought one of the BNC adapters for this radio, as we had for the FT50. Some microphones have a large enough plug that it's a tight fit with this adapter. When Diamond announced their BNCJ-SMAP adapter, we bought one to see how it would work. It's just a slight bit narrower, and the microphone we have fits into the jacks with no trouble. We added a rubber O-ring to the base, as the sleeve on the adapter isn't quite long enough to seal off the space.