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AOR AR-Mini
This small pocket sized radio is splash & spray resistant to JIS4 standards making it ideal as a companion when out and about, particularly with operation lasting up to 22 hours between battery charges. Coverage of 100kHz to 1299.995MHz , AM, NFM & WFM. All of this in a size of 60mm x 90mm x 24mm and a weight including batteries & aerial of 210g. Accessories supplied are; 2 x AA NiMH cells, AC charger/adaptor (3 pin for UK), whip antenna, belt clip, hand strap and instruction manual. Your AR-Mini comes with two NiMH AA cells, AC adapter, SMA flexible antenna, belt clip, hand strap and manual After owning a few AOR scanners in the past I have been a great fan of these products. Once we got past the aor ar-2000 and into the AOR8000 they produced some fine receivers and the 8200 in all guises was for me a great scanner. The only criticism that could be said about them was that although they were packed with features they lacked some features that other cheaper scanners came with such as ctcss/dcs decoding. Although AOR did sell an add on slot card for decoding ctcss this came at a hefty price and a lot of people myself included considered this a bit of a con. When I saw AOR had at last produced a scanner with these features built in and also inversion scramble decoding I just had to get my hands on one and see how well it faired against other receivers of this price range and had AOR come up with the goods. User manual As this will be your next port of call after handling your new scanner I thought a few words regarding the use of the manual were in order. Basically I found the manual easy to use and it seems a lot better than the on line version that is flawed with spelling mistakes. On first appearance the scanner did not look as mini as I had thought being the same width as my Uniden BCD396/3500 however it was slimmer and at least a good inch shorter.( 2.4 x 3.7 x 0.9 inches 7.4 oz.) All black in colour and a nice feel in the hand. There was a lack of numerical buttons ala Icom ICR5 (I just know i will be comparing it a lot to the icom during the course of this review)
The unit is made up of just 6 buttons for various programming tasks but finding frequencies is done either by searching or using the rotary Knob to "Dial in" to your chosen frequency. A break away from previous AOR scanners and following the trend of fashion is the implementation of a sma type antenna. This will limit the number of antennas you can use unless you fit an sma-bnc connector. Next to the antenna connector is a 3.5mm jack plug for discrete monitoring. above the buttons is a very ample sized lcd display.The bottom half of the front fascia is made up of the speaker grill. The rear being a no nonsense affair with just the holes for the fitting of the supplied belt clip and at the bottom being the clip for the battery compartment. It must be said that I liked the clip fitting I found inserting batteries a bit tight just like it was with the 8200 and although fiddly to get into place once the back is clipped down you get the feeling that the batteries are not going anywhere as it is a very secure fitting. In all I grew to like the look and feel of the AR mini in the hand. Without the belt clip it fitted into the hand like a hand fits in a glove.
LCD Display. The display is a very good size that even the visually impaired should not have problems reading. The frequencies and texts are really shown in big numerals and letters. This became more obvious when I went back to using one of my other scanners as everything looked tiny compared to the AOR. Tiny but in my opinion nicer on the eye I have to say. Back light The back light is a pleasant green colour, however reading the display from anything other than straight down becomes hard when the light is activated. There are various user settings that can be set from infinite or temporary. Antenna The antenna supplied with the AOR is a very nice tapered antenna measuring 5". New for AOR and following the latest fashion they have switched to an SMA type fitting instead of the usual BNC. Testing it on vhf and uhf it definitely had a preference for uhf It would have been nice if AOR had supplied a sma-bnc connector with the unit but they can be picked up for a couple of pounds from any maplins store or similar.
Alpha tagging You can add alpha tags (Names) to memory channels again just like the Icom R5 you are restricted to just 6 characters but when the R5 came out Alpha tags were a big bonus today they are a must and I feel that with such a large display on the AOR and with the use of such large lettering then we have not advanced at all since the R5 came available quite a few years back now. Battery charging AOR kindly supply two 2500 mah batteries I found charging these a bit "different" for want of a better word. For a start off you have to go into the menu to activate the battery charging circuit and I was never sure that the batteries were receiving a charge as the Battery icon never seemed to change. It has a half filled battery icon and that never even after 24 hours moved to a fill state. However you can go into the menu and display the battery voltage. I hit a problem here whereas I could only get approx 1 hours use when charging internally with the supplied psu. When charging externally I got plenty of use out of the AOR and although I did not measure the useage I got I think it would be safe to say that you will get a lot of battery life. I don't know what the problem was here it just seemed that the supplied charger did not seem to work properly or maybe it was the charging circuit in this particular review model. The AOR has a batter saver circuit with user definable settings to determine how often the radio will check for activity which is a very nice feature to have although I kept it down to about 1 sec so as not to miss any activity. As previously mentioned, another very nice feature is the ability to check the battery voltage at any time. This is a feature I love with my Uniden's and i have to thank AOR for employing this feature. Powering up the unit gives a "Hello" message displayed. Oh well that is a bit different. Powering down gives a "Bye" message displayed. I had intended using the software to program the AR-Mini however I felt it best to learn how to program by hand so I could assess the difficulty/ ease of use out in the field. Whilst on the subject of software AOR offer free software for the AOR Mini. Free? Yes absolutely free! But so it bloody well should be as the programming cable comes in at a whopping 40 plus pounds!! After some grappling with the programming I eventually got it up and running the problem was me trying to run before I could walk as i typically do without properly reading the manual. Most operations are done from VFO mode and to get to your favourite frequencies you have to "Dial in" using the rotary knob on the top of the unit and once you have dialed in to your favourite frequency you can place it into memory. I found this takes a bit of a knack as to place it into memory you have to press and hold func button on the side and whilst holding it down press "V/M" you should now see a free memory ch flash up. release all buttons and now once again press and hold down func and "V/M" now the trick here is to release the v/m button first and you will see the text "WRITE" come up and your frequency is added into memory. you can also use any of the various search modes to find active frequencies and from here enter into memory. After entering a few channels I decided to try scanning which turned out to be not the fastest there is out there, I a miserly 8 seconds to be exact. I am used to 100 chg's sec so this was a big disappointment for me. If you only have a small pool of frequencies that you monitor then this wont be a big problem. Another thing I did not like was that when you pressed scan to set it scanning there was a delay of a second between pressing the scan button and the scanner actually scanning. (Just tried this now and the problem seems to have rectified itself). The AOR comes with a ten segment signal strength meter that I liked very much, you can adjust the settings of this so that different signal strengths are required to give different 1-10 scores but I was happy with the default setting, happily watching it dance up and down as a signal fluctuated in strength. Step sizes should cater for everyone's needs which are selectable 5, 6.25, 8.33,9,10,12.5,15,20,25,30,50,100Khz . You can arrange memories into banks and you can scan any one of the banks or link the banks to be scanned.Limit searches can be linked or searched individually too but due to the slow search speeds of the AOR I personally would not bother linking them. I found an annoying feature of the AOR Mini and for me it's a terrible feature. It appeared that when scanning, after a few seconds the scanner would whizz off scanning other channels. No problem I thought to myself I have come across this before I will deactivate it. Well it appears that you can't! the best you can do is 12 seconds and that's it! This for me was terrible as some conversations especially on trunked systems go on for much much longer than this. Priority I did not even bother using this feature as a quick look at the user manual told me it was just the same set up as the icom IC-R5....Useless!!! it can only be used in vfo mode so no channels can be tagged for priority checking during a memory scan. Channels can be selected to be ignored during a scan. ctcss With a few channels programmed I decided to investigate one of the features i have so longed to see in an AOR scanner and that is the use of ctcss/dcs tones which as I say was left out of the 8200 for some unknown reason. Sure you could buy an add on card for ctcss use but if my memory serves me well this was around the £60 mark a big let down for AOR in my opinion especially when most scanners costing a fraction of the price these days has it built in. I went into vfo mode and dialed into a known frequency and set the tone search on. I was expecting a slow trawl through all the available ctcss tones until it eventually settled on the correct tone just like my old Icom IC-R5 did. Imagine my amazement when I found it was probably as quick at the Uniden's that brag near instant ctcss/dcs decoding! I was very impressed with this however I can see no provision to search for active DCS tones only ctcss. AOR really have failed to boast about what is probably a very good selling feature in their advertising literature. Impressed with my findings I went through the instruction manual and added tones to the channels I had put into memory. Now with tones added i did a scan of these channels and was severely disappointed. The problem being that the little AOR is just too slow at decoding ctcss and dcs tones. What you will see is when scanning and one of your toned up channels becomes active the scanner will pause you will see the signal strength meter go up the AOR will think about whether it is a valid tone before it allows any audio but it thinks for too long and the scanner will resume scanning before it makes up its mind that it is indeed the correct tone. This happened on every single ch that had a tone added, ctcss or dcs and made the feature inoperable and a very bad design fault. Sitting on a channel having halted the scan did not improve things a great deal to be honest. Again the sig strength meter would rise the scanner would sit there muted for a couple of seconds deciding if it was a valid tone or not and then it would decide that yes it was valid but now you had missed the beginning of the conversation and during the rest of the conversation it would keep chopping in and out. Also I found even with a tone added I would still get periodic interference on a channel from my computer screen that gives out a bit of crud on the radios. This really should not happen but I have seen it before in another transceiver but that has a good excuse, it's a £40 chinese radio. A google search of the the Aor-mini revealed that another user experienced the same problem as me here so I cannot blame it on a dodgy unit. All this for me is a major disappointment as I have plenty of channels that I assign tones to as there are many users on the same frequency but using different tones I would not be able to block out unwanted users. Audio quality I have to say that although I don't like its hissy speaker I appear to be the only one that complains about this as some very good receivers have the very same type of audio the Alinco djx 2000 being one and people say they like it on that. Setting the volume at its maximum setting of 10 however and the audio does start to sound a bit tinny. Listening from a distance say from one room to another and I can't help feeling that the audio is anything but puny in its audio. Searching The AR-Mini has a couple of searching options vfo or limit search. I decided to try setting up a limit search and following the instructions in the manual I found this an easy enough affair but unfortunately the AOR does not search must faster than it scans. Dual watch I was itching to try this feature out. I have not used a scanner with this feature since I reviewed the icom R-20 a few years back and I really liked this on the R-20. Following the instructions to set this up was straightforward and easy. I had just the two frequencies in mind to check this feature out to see how well it performed. I like to keep my frequencies in ascending order, it's a habit i have kept since early aor's would scan faster when in ascending order. Not only that it makes channels easier to find. Now the two frequencies I wanted to dual watch are on the same site but a few Mhz apart so when I wish to listen to both on any of my other scanners it can become a chore unless I power up two scanners one sat on each frequency. Not only that i sometimes like to visit the site where these two frequencies are in use and taking along two scanners is not really practical. In all honesty the dual watch feature of the AOR is not nearly as sophisticated as the one on the R20. In effect the AOR appears to just be flicking between the two frequencies that you set up but again in all fairness its a lot cheaper scanner than the R20 and does the job it says without all the bells and whistles and a well worthy feature to have. When I first started using this scanner I thought it was a copy of the Icom R5 but this added feature makes it stand out a bit from the icom-R5. Descrambler This is a new feature and is also a welcome one for me this will decode users using analogue inversion scrambling. I have a radio that has inversion capabilities and so I set it to scramble mode and set up the AOR to decode and going through the various inversion points on the AOR I was listening loud and clear to my daughter talking whereas she was unintelligible moments earlier. Once the correct inversion point is found you can save this to memory. Sensitivity I could not find any web site where I could copy and paste the sensitivity figures but as they mean nothing to me anyway as all my reviews are done in layman terms (Or stupid mans terms if you prefer) but if you want them they are available on this pdf document . Testing on UHF I found the little AOR mini a very sensitive receiver indeed pulling in signals from a great distance. I really have to take my hat off to AOR here they have not always in my opinion produced sensitive scanners (Aor 2000 being a prime example). Just for a test I tuned into some distant signals that my Uniden BCD396T could just about hear and then see how the AOR compared. Discarding the supplied antenna for something more appropriate as the supplied one is not happy at vhf, Finding a distant signal on 451MHz with the Uniden just about audible but with a fair amount of background noise switching to the AOR and the signal was being picked up very cleanly with no background noise. Switching to mil air 252.875 I found the Uniden definitely had the edge here with the ground side of comm's being rock steady reception on the Uniden but rather shaky on the AOR. On VHf PMR I found it on a par with my Uniden's with nothing to choose between them. Connecting it to my collinear antenna however brought in plenty of pager interference but this is no criticism of the AOR as my other scanners do also. Bug sweep feature Yes I tried it. It appears to search a list of known bug frequencies that are pre loaded into the scanner and check for any activity. Personally I did not think much to this feature when I saw it on the Alinco djx-2000 and it still does not do anything for me today. As someone that does private investigation work I would not rely on this for my bug sweeps. That is not to say it wont work though, if a bug is transmitting on one of those frequencies scanned in the bug sweep it will get found out. Canceling the Muting The AR-Mini comes with a feature called canceling the muting which basically means when you scan instead of the receiver remaining silent until an active ch is found, once set you now get loads of squelch noise whilst in a scan. Just one question here. WHY? Why would anyone want that is beyond me and seems a useless feature to me. Summary This little scanner is definitely in the same league as the Icom IC-R5 design wise however there are a few things to consider here firstly the R5 was created quite a few years ago now. and AOR should really have been aiming their sights a little higher. However in all fairness I think any scanner that is brought out in the £150 ish price bracket is going to be up against it with Uniden's fully featured 3500 which sells for a similar price. I feel the Uniden was well under priced and as a result it has made it so hard for any other manufacturer to get a look in at the £150 mark. Full marks though to AOR for bringing out a new scanner and giving it features we have requested for some time. The near instant decoding of ctcss tones is an absolute god send. However they will have to sort the problem of the tones added to memory being decoded a lot quicker because as it stands that is not acceptable the dual watch feature gives it a "Bunk" up over the R5 and is another welcome feature. Reading messages on various scanner forums has not been very inviting to the AOR ar-mini to be honest, a lot of people feel that AOR are still behind with the times when it comes to commercial Joe public scanners and that the AOR-mini is basically an Icom R5 with a few more features and a few features that work better on the R5. Personally I wanted the AOR to do well I really did as I loved the aor8200 in all its mk's. But sadly I found it lacking mainly due to the tone decoding feature not being steady enough. If they can rectify this problem then just maybe the ar-mini will stand a chance.
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reviewed.[ Aor 8200 ]
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