Butch,

You are correct.

Early runs of the V7A up through a serial number that I forgot long ago 
had a display that would fail.

I owned one of those units for a few years. For some time, Kenwood 
would replace the control head free of charge, but they no longer do that.

That problem aside, the TMV7A is very reliable, but the voice feedback 
in its menus is more like that in the TS570 or TS2000, since it uses 
the same voice chip as those radios.

As I said above, the radio is very reliable. I bought mine used from 
Anthony, W2AJV, who is on this list, in either 2003, or 2004. I sold it 
to a local sighted ham after I bought my TMV71A in 2008. He still 
checks into our local nets with it every week.

-- 
Mike Duke, K5XU