Well I would suggest either of these two radio's.

Airtronics RD8000 if you want a name brand with good support behind it and years of good service. There are not many radios out there that have the features for the price.

Next would be the budget priced 9x. It gets a bad rap from people who have never touched it, used it and only parrot what has been said on other forums. Mine has been every bit as reliable as I could want. Never a glitch, brown out, or loss of signal. It does have a few issues, when you turn it on, "mode" is really "model" There are 3 other typos in the programming. Yet, if you do an upgrade to the firm wear, you get double the model memory and a ton more features.

With any brand, there are those that do not like them. I flew with a group and I was the only person to fly Airtronics. They cliamed mine was only good enough for "sport" flying. Yet in the two years I flew with them, Futaba and the Jr radios went back for service a couple times and my RD6000 just worked. HMMMM Wonder what that is all about.

People always say to go to the club and buy what they fly. This is based on if you need help you will have it. That is very narrow view for a reason to buy a radio. If you need help, there are forums all over the place. Well if I am at the field, how do I go to a forum, you have a phone right? Does it have net access? The "need" to fly what every one else does used to be a big reason to buy the same radio as others. I watched 6 people work on a Futaba 10 channel trying to get it to program some function. After almost 2 hours, they still could not figure it out. So even at the field, you may not get the help you need. The new radio are so much easier to program than the old ones.

When you talk about a radio, it is like trying to talk about football teams. People can get down right nasty about it.

Buzz.