Tag: Yaesu FT-817

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Yaesu FT-817My precious FT-817 still is lying around in the shack unable to transmit. I’ve studied the service manual and did some measuring around in it. Regular readers of my blog know that a while back suddenly my Yaesu broke down due to shortage. It seems like a capacitor on the voltage input blew and took something with it. I let the input fix by a local service shop but that alone cost me already 75 euro’s. So now the Yaesu is able to receive again, but still no transmit.
My intention is to fix that myself. The local repairman told me it’s probably due to blown finals that the rig isn’t transmitting. That would make me a member of the “Blown Finals Club”. But I’m not quite convinced by his story. When only the finals are blown, you should get a very faint signal as output. But there is absolutely no signal at all. Not even when I take another receiver and poke around with that antenna in the transmit line of the Yeasu, no signal at all. So maybe the oscillator or driver stage must be (also) broken to get this behavior.

This would be my very first big repair job, there for I’m not in possession of various measuring equipment. The only measuring device I have is a multimeter. That won’t bring me very far in this case. Fred, PA3YH has a Multimeter which can measure HF-signals. A RF-millivolt meter, such as referenced to in the service manual. But it has a maximum reading frequency of 100 KHz. The RF-millivolt meter reads like 2,6 volts AC on the output of the oscillator (the service manual says it should be 66mV). But the output signal from the oscillator has a frequency of 65.875 MHz. So it’s logical the meter is not reading the correct voltage.
Okay, so I don’t know if the output of oscillator is correct, but I DO know that the oscillator has output! So I guess now I should look to the first driver stage.
But I think I’ll look for someone with a good scope first. It’s easier to check all the checkpoints in the service manual and also check if they have the correct value.
If anyone has good tips on how to find the problem, let me know!

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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!

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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 😉