Favorite VHF Radio for a Houseboat

by Chuck
(South Carolina)

Our favorite VHF Radio for our houseboat has to be the Uniden UM525 model. It's full of great features that we find handy on our house boat.

The things that we appreciate about it are:

1) The hailer PA (public address) feature allows us to speak and hear voices from far ahead of our houseboat. A real pleasure when you're docking or approaching a fuel dock.

2) It has a "wireless Mic" option that lets us have a remote unit for when we drive from the fly-bridge. We didn't have to install a second VHF radio upstairs.

3) It has the new DSC feature that lets us communicate with our friends with DSC radios, and have their exact position and locations displayed on our chartplotter.

4) We have our GPS connected to the unit, this way should a emergency occur, we can press the DSC button and have our location immediately transmitted to the Coast Guard and other vessel in the area. Hopefully we never need to.

5) It's one of the few radios that has a handy "intercom system". It makes calling or speaking with my wife who is often below much easier, this way I don't have to shout.

6) The rest of the features that I like are things like the 3 yr warranty, waterproof, fog signal capable, channel scanner, weather alert, and a slew of other useful benefits.

I guess you can tell that we love our new radio, and we would definitely buy one again.

Oh ya, the best part, the price of the UM525 is really good for all that you get.

Chuck, from South Carolina.


Reply - Answer
Well Chuck, I can appreciate how you feel since my wife and I have the same radio, and we also got the wireless mic option so that we could use it on the flybridge. This way I didn't have to install another radio :)

We bought the Uniden UM525 VHF radio because it had excellent reviews. Hopefully some of our readers will share and post comments about their VHF Radio experiences.


IAN - from www.all-about-houseboats.com