Re: Hey BMJ....

Me wrote:

<snip>

Those instructions (and the complexity) of these new rigs certainly takes a lot more than in the old days of few knobs and few switches. Menus, submenues, and conditional steps are a pain.

Yaesu's rather bad for that sort of thing. Programming my VX-7R HT has been known to test my patience.

They are all pretty bad, actually.

My first radio was an FT-2800 2 m FM rig. It's quite nice but I usually need my manual on hand in order to program it. Some of the local repeaters changed their input signals to include tones and I found setting the radio up for that a bit aggravating.

Once it's set up, though, it's great.


I also have a VX-170 (2M HT) and a FT-1802 (mobile 2M FM).

Watch out for the HTs now, they are mostly coming out with those little dinky screw on "output" connectors (instead of BNCs) and the guy at the store says they break off easily.

I've noticed that on my VX-7R. The rubber duck antenna screws on, but if I want to connect the radio to a different one, I have to add an electrician's nightmare worth of connectors and adaptors. If I'm not careful, I could cause some damage.

I also find the rubber duck to be a bit flimsy. I usually take my HT with me wherever I go in case of emergency, as I don't own a cellphone any more. If I can't carry it on my belt, I put it in my backpack where, after I put other things in it, the antenna sometimes gets bent.

I bought an '80s vintage Icom HT at a flea market last year. It's about the size of a brick and it looks like it's built like one. That radio looks like it could take a lot of punishment and still work like a charm.


The last VHF
multimode rig I had was a good 20 years ago (Icom 260A) which was quite nice for a 2 meter only CW/SSB, 10 watt output, rig, and very simple to figure out (without even reading the manual, or reading very little of it). I wish I had kept
it, and the only drawback was that the tuning capability was in increments of 100 Hz and that is too coarse for SSB. The 817 has 10 Hz increments.

We have a local 2 m SSB QRP net. I don't know how many are actually operating at 5 W maximum. My FT-817 is quite nice for that.

I'll probabaly be building amplifiers, or buying a brick for 2 M to get more like 50 watts out (for SSB).

A few users on the Yahoo group I mentioned before, plus some on a Yahoo backpack radio group I also subscribe to, have discussed using amps with the FT-817.



But, now I have HF, 6, 2, and 440, and all modes, again. Something I've been dreaming about for years. The built-in battery will be nice for some
things, too, but I'll probably operate it off an AC supply quite a bit of
the time.

Be *very* careful when using external power. Soon after I got my rig, I was running it off an external battery. Something when wrong while I was packing it around and it could only run off the internal supply.

? In my experience the problem is that you hook up the polirity reversed, and they may have a protective fuse inside that was blown out. Not all gear has this, but sometimes that is what it is.

I suspect that I might have shorted the battery and something went kablooie inside. It turns out that a lot of users have had that happen to them, according to traffic on the 817 Yahoo group. I finally sent the radio away to a place down east that services them (Yaesu doesn't have an outlet in Canada, though Icom does). It turned out that I blew an SMT fuse.

One of the shortcomings of the FT-817 is that it doesn't have an external fuse like my FT-2800 or my IC-706. A number of users wouldn't mind seeing that design oversight corrected.


I bought a mess of
rechargeable batteries and operated it with those.

My manual says don't use rechargeable AA Nicads, just use alkaline cells (should have higher energy density, anyway). Or the FNB-whatever, there are two options on those, the Yauesu NiCad and the Yausu NiMH.

I haven't had any problem with it so far others than I get about a week's worth of operation out of them. I think they're NiMH and put out a maximum of about 1.3 V.

One reason I got the tool belt is that I'd like to operate from an external battery first and, when it depletes, continue on internal power until the former can be charged.


Unfortunately, I have to
change them out about every six hours and they often die in mid-QSO.

IIRC, there should be a way to program the read-out to continuously measure battery voltage. I'm still new at this and some 80 pages of nitty gritty manual is overwhelming.

Yes. It's displayed in the upper left-hand corner of the display. When the radio's switched on, the voltage is briefly shown. I have my radio set up to show whether the rig's tuned manually or from memory.

There's also a battery indicator in the lower right-hand corner. When it indicates "low", the radio could die any time. Batteries, however, tend to produce a near-constant voltage until their state of charge gets close to about 20% when it drops off rapidly. Battery indicators, therefore, aren't always a good judge of



Howver, there is a lot of extraneous RF interference in my area (we have a cellphone tower 900 feet from the house,

There are several cellphone repeaters on one of the highrises in my apartment complex.

and gobs of electronic
devices in the house), and also I think some of the signals I can pick up are
"birdies" from the rig itself (they don't go away when I disconnect the
antenna input, but spurious responses are not uncommon in these things, too). But, its the same problem with almost any of the cheaper SWL
receivers that are run off PLL local oscillators instead of free-running
local oscilators.

I've got an Icom IC-706MkIIG and I hear a lot of that sort of stuff on HF SSB. It's quite irritating.

You can thank the techie progress of the human race for all the spectrum polution (and solid state devices which are much worse than the tube versions).

I used to live in the same building 25 years ago. I used to be more active as a SWL back then. Listening to the 60 m tropical band stations was quite easy in those days. Now, most of the signals that might be available on those frequencies are buried under all sorts of RFI. It doesn't help that I live right beside one of the major shopping centres in the city which is lit up most of the night like a neon palace.

One nasty source of RFI I've found are LEDs. Try taking an HF receiver by a traffic light that uses them and listen to the hash coming out of the speaker.



I also bought a 15 ele 440 yagi but have not opened the box yet.

Aside from repeaters and satellites, I rarely work 70 cm.

We have one 440 box here, and its linkable with gazillions of other 440 boxes up the east coast.

We've got several 70 cm machines in the area. One is permanently linked to a repeater backbone that runs along the main north-south highway. There are a number of 2 m machines that can be linked to it with DTMF codes, so, during the week, there are several nets running on the system.

Add in some IRLP capability, and one can add repeaters from all over the place to it.



So... I'm on my way to trying the satellites sometime in the near future and there is a little bit of VHF (6 meters, SSB) and UHF activity in my area besides 2 meters. I don't hear anyone talking about 220, either, so that tells me there isn't much interest in that band.

We've got a 1.3 m repeater in the local area but I don't know how many hams work that band. The government up here recently trimmed off some of it

Here, too.

Aside from a brief announcement and a few murmurs, few people took any notice. That band isn't popular, largely because most radios available now don't appear to be set up for it. I could work it with my VX-7R, but it's only at low power.

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