And yes an early riser I am sir. Have to be for work!! It's what pays for my bills/hobbies. This hobby can be expensive as well!! And as far as the radios you have listed above, the Connex is an AM only radio with extra freqs. No good for anything other than AM though. And stay away from the Galaxy radios, again good AM radio but they drift around freq and that is no good for sideband. You want a rock solid stable radio for SSB and want to upgrade radios, look at the Yeticom Optima MK3. Best SSB export radio I've used. And they have and extra filter for SSB which no other export radio on the market has. I have one and have used it for 3 or 4 years now and it had a rough life the first 3yrs anyway. It was a work van radio that saw many bad dirt roads and pot holes and such. The radio is well built and took the licking and kept on ticking. Kind of like simple timex watch. They do about 50-60 watts on SSB and about 50 watts pep on AM, 12 watt AVG. They aren't as good on am as they are on SSB. On SSB they rock! If you were to order direct from the dealer which is in New Zealand, you'd get the better mic with the radio and it would be aligned and tuned properly. And it will have a warranty. About $300 shipped they cost. You can also get them off eBay for like $265-270 when you can find them. They have a freq range of 24.500 to 29.999. No banks of channels. Radio tunes from one end to the other in 5K steps, so you get all the zero freqs as well. Nice for SSB dxing as you can get away from a lot of bs. Anyway just some more food for thought.