Yaesu FT-817I’ve picked up my Yaesu FT817 from the shop the other day. They hadn’t good news for me. After 2,5 hours of working the engineer managed to get it back to life. Well, it received. Transmitting still was broke. It seems that the feds are broken too.
I’ve picked it up because the bill was already up in the sky. Further repair would cost more money then what the rig is worth these days.
Maybe I can fix the feds myself. Until then I’ve got myself a nice receiver!

dxwatchA few weeks ago when I was visiting France (JN24XM) the conditions where very poor. The only excitement was a few sporadic e’s on 10m.

Last night I was sitting around in the shack. Conditions where pretty good all day. But later that evening they were really picking up. Without much trouble I’ve worked 2 South America stations: NP3XF (Puerto Rico) and YV5OHM (Venezuela).
The cluster keeps coming up with all great spots. It was a really nice to enjoy it.

Just a few minutes after twelve I was able to pull myself out of the shack and into bed. With a big smile on my face!

Yaesu FT-817It is a very sad sad day. My first rig, a Yeasu FT-817, is broken.
The other day I wanted to turn it on, but it was dead. Shaking the rig gave me all weird noises, so I opened it. Seems that there was an exploded elco in it. All kind of lose smd pieces around the elco. It look a bit like a mess. Actually it seems that there was some kind of shortage in de power.

So I took the rig to the local repair man. All that smd stuff is a bit too new for me. I hope he will be able to fix it… Let’s cross fingers. I would like to have a working 817 for nostalgic purposes 😉