I have been researching the Yaesu FT3DR and I have a few questions regarding it.

1) I have heard that charging the radio through plugging the supplied AC adapter into the DC port on the side is a slow process with a full charge taking upwards of 9 hours. Has anyone tried charging the radio from a 12v/13.8v power supply? Is the slow charging due to the low milliamperage output of the included AC charger or is it due to the onboard charge controller IC in the radio?

​

2) Speaking of charging, I read this post on Reddit that gave me concern:

"I don't own a FT3DR, I do own a FT2DR and a FT70. A good friend of mine who is an electronic engineer by trade does own the FT3DR. He discovered that if you plug the FT3DR into a charger via the port on the side of the radio, the receiver become desensed. Evidently the internal DC to DC converter puts out RF noise and desenses the receiver. Yaesu's explanation is that radio was designed to run off battery only and the port on the side is for charging only. If you want to operate the radio while charging please purchase the drop in charger. I tested my FT2DR and it suffers the same issue."

Has anyone experienced this?

​

3) I have read reports of pops or popping sounds in the audio such as these quotations from eHam reviews:

"... squelch pops when you change frequencies or scan"

"Also when APRS is functioning and you use the encoder to scroll through the APRS 1 to 28 menu items the annoying static POP is back. This only happens when the modem is on at 1200. Modem off, no noise. Select a station heard in the S.List, tap to review, and use the encoder to scroll thru the various screens of APRS data for the station. The Blue led lights up and the static POP is heard for each turn of the encoder. This happens with the modem on or off. Not the quality expected for a HT at this price point."

Or this quotation from a post on Reddit:

"...APRS - I can’t comment on decoding quality, but I will say that yes, it does make an annoying popping sound every time the squelch opens to receive a transmission."

Is this a known issue?

​

4) How has the GPS sensitivity as well as APRS decode ability been for you? Do you find the sensitivity on par with that of other similarly equipped HT's?

​

5) Has anyone had any experience with broadcast FM sensitivity?

I reference this quotation from eHam:

"...The FM broadcast wide band (90Mhz) receiver is dismal compared to the FT1XDR. It gets a
scratchy S1 where the FT1XDR gets an S5, in the same spot."

Any assistance or insights would be appreciated. I am just trying to do a bit of data gathering.