You can make radios that do really wide swaths with really good performance. ICOM already makes receivers that go from 50KHz to 6GHz with little performance is

You can make radios that do really wide swaths with really good performance. ICOM already makes receivers that go from 50KHz to 6GHz with little performance issues other than those related to antenna interfacing. In another post you mention the Astro and Astro25 radios (XTS3000/XTS5000), if we look at a Spectra as an example, the UHF R2 units do 438-470, thats 33MHz, the XTS3000 has a 66MHz tuning range it can work with (403-470MHz for example) the XTS5000 has a range of some 90MHz (380-470MHz for example)... this is achieved through more finite control of the analog portions of the transceiver circuits and through software defined first IF. So we are already seeing the fruits of SDR in some 20 year old Motorola products. We can go in the opposite direction and look at how older radios like the Syntor had tunable working bands of 12 or less MHz, and theres always the MX300 series, with its crystals and tuning needed after that. As the quality and bandwidth of RF parts gets better year over year we will be seeing more improvements like this. So, in conclusion, I do not see how making one common base transceiver of about 5W output and using separate external power amplifiers per-band is not an achievable goal, considering this is already a product that is currently being manufactured by Harris for both the military and public safety markets.