By popular demand.... ****************************************************************************** DISCLAIMER: PERFORM THIS PROCEDURE AT YOUR OWN RISK. THE POSTER(S) OF THIS PROCEDURE ASSUME NO LIABILITY, AND THIS PROCEDURE IS POSTED FOR GENERAL INFORMATION ONLY. THE FT-51R RADIO IS NOT FCC-TYPE ACCEPTED FOR TRANSMISSION OUTSIDE OF THE AMATEUR RADIO FREQUENCIES. THIS MODIFICATION ENABLES TRANSMISSION ON FREQUENCIES OUTSIDE OF THE AMATEUR RADIO BAND, AND IS LEGAL FOR THOSE INDIVIDUALS WITH MARS/CAPS CERTIFICATES. THIS MODIFICATION REQUIRES THE USE OF A LOW POWER FINE TIP SOLDERING IRON. INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE NOT EXPERIENCED WITH SOLDERING OF SURFACE MOUNT TECHNOLOGY SHOULD NOT ATTEMPT THIS MODIFICATION, YOU COULD RUIN YOUR RADIO. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mod # 1, Extended TX/RX 134-174, 420-470 1. Remove the battery pack from the radio. 2. Remove the four screws directly beneath the battery pack on the radio. 3. Remove the two screws holding the contact portion of the battery compartment. 4. Remove the screw and battery pack release lever. (the following steps make removal of the battery holding compartment easier) 4. Remove the four screws on the bottom portion of the back of the cabinet. Carefully remove the two halves of the radio. Pay attention to the gasket as you are seperating the cabinet. 5. Remove the battery pack holding compartment. The section you will know be working with is directly underneath the battery pack holding compartment (behind the touch tone pad). 6. There is a ribbon cable connected to the control board. You can leave the ribbon cable attached if you're a GOOD solderer, or you can release the two little black levers on each side of the ribbon cable and CAREFULLY slide the ribbon cable out of the socket and hold it back towards the case with a piece of tape. Be careful not to put a bend in the ribbon cable or pierce it. 7. Locate a set of etched jumpers on the pc board. They are located adjacent to the bend in the ribbon cable. They are not marked, and are situated as follows (o-o indicates closed, o o indicates open): JP1001 o-o o o JP1005 JP1002 o o o o JP1006 JP1003 o o o-o JP1007 JP1004 o-o 8. Using solder wick or your preferred method of solder-removal, carefully remove the jumper for JP1007. This enables the 134-174, 420-470 MHz transmit. 9. Reassemble the radio, remembering to reinstall the gasket, and tocarefully reinsert the ribbon cable if you removed it from the socket, and fasten down the little black socket locks. 10. Press the MHZ /\ and MHZ \/ buttons simultaneously while turning the power on to the radio. This enables the modification. Some notes: I experimented with removing JP1004, and it had no apparent effect. I did not experiment with any of the other jumpers except JP1007. There still may be 800 MHz receive buried some where in the radio, the Japanese version has 800 MHz receive. An earlier posting of mine indicates four large resistors (well, non-surface mount) connected between various microprocessor and memory pins, clearly an add-on. Experimentation with removing these produced no effect, HOWEVER, this was prior to my discovery of the JP1007 mod. I've played with the radio enough now, and don't want to push my luck, so let's let someone else try to find out if there are any more secrets buried in this fine piece of gear. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mod # 2 Here are the mods for the Yaesu FT-51r. Please let me know if you find additional interesting mods. 1) The following mod will wipe the memory contents of the radio. If you want to preserve the memory, make a backup of the radio into your PC (using RS 232 cable) first. You will need a step-up invertor (like the MAX 232) between the radio and the PC, and on the PC a terminal program that can handle all bytes (including nulls and Ctrl-Z's). Use 9600 bps. Hold down the F/M key while turning on, and press the up arrow as soon as the PC is ready to receive the data. I guess you understood it already. Now erase the memory, and make another backup. You will need this 'empty' dump later to compare the different bit patterns with an empty dump made after the mod, to patch these differences in the memory backup you want to restore. Otherwise the radio won't accept the original memory backup after you made the modification. Of course, you can also use the commercial software package to program the FT-51r. 2) Remove battery and 6 screws of rear-side radio (behind the keypad). Also remove the battery removal clip. Loosen the other four rear-side screws somewhat. 3) Carefully remove the L type plastic cover located behind the keypad. 4) Now locate the solder pads next to the CPU: 0 1 0 2 0 3 0 4 0 5 0 6 0 7 5) Solder pad 6 is for extended TRANSMIT. Be carefull not to burn other components with the solder iron! If this is the only mod, you are ready now! (Go to 13). 6) If you want to fiddle with the band plan of the radio, you need to do the following: 7) Open solder pad 7. 8) Temporary assemble the radio (do not fasten all screws, you will need to open the radio again) and insert the battery. 9) Press and hold Vol UP/Vol DOWN & CALL keys at the same time while you turn the power on. The radio should respond with 'BAND #', where # represents the band lay-out number. 10) Press F/M for a second, and select then a different band by using the up and down keys (NOT THE DIAL!). I found that band 5 is the most interesting. Then press F/M and CALL, and it should automatically power off. 11) Turn on the radio, switch to extended receive (!), and check the VFO limits. The left VFO should run from 60 to 180 MHz, 300 to 512 MHz, and the right one has the same, but IN ADDITION also the range from 700 til 999 MHz! It may be that you need to repeat the process from 9) again but now with the right VFO active to make it work on the right VFO too. I found that sometimes you get different results, there is probably some other yet unknown factor determining what you get too. (Maybe the actual current VFO settings?) Repeating the above process and changing the band numbers again can produce somewhat different results. 12) Open the radio again and close solder pad 7. 13) Now securely close the radio. 14) Restore or reprogram the memories. If you want to restore a dump made on your PC: First make a new (empty) backup. Compare this backup with the one you already had, and note the few differences. Now patch these different bits into your original backup. Now you can restore it. The radio will terminate with an error because the checksum doesn't match, but the memory will be correctly programmed anyway. So who cares? For the purists: the checksum at the end is a simple addition of all previous bytes. Some remarks: Although the right VFO will be able to tune into the 700 til 999 MHz frequencies, I found that the Yaesu is not able to actually receive anything here. It seems that there are some components missing. Although the other VFO boundaries are now wider, the sensitivity of the radio in these 'extended' areas is poor. The same applies to the RF Power. My RF set ceases to transmit at 500 MHz and above, but other sets may cut off RF Power at higher or somewhat lower frequencies. I also found the area between 60 - 100 MHz of no use, except for extremely poor reception, it also causes interference on the other VFO. But the Mod is worth experimenting with, and usefull near the boundaries of the original band lay-out. It is worth noting that with a memory backup made on a PC you can do all kind of weird things. You can change the BCD frequenties to values the radio wouldn't normally accept. If you want to set it to a medium wave frequency, go ahead! Also, even in NON-extended receive mode you can change the frequencies to out-of-band values. It works! Anyway, please let me know what else you discover. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For $40 you can get the RT Systems software for the 51. With this software you can program every function of the radio via the PC. You can also change a setting in the win.ini file and extend the receive range from 66 to 999Mhz without messing around with the transmit side and without taking apart the radio. It works real well except for the 800 stuff. It appears the radio is stone deaf in that region, probably short a few circuits. Les ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Freq limit limited by the cpu (the readout freq) is 60-999MHZ, of course id doesnt receive and transmit on all this band, in vhf it transnits from 121-179MHZ in uhf it is 319-488 of course the output pwr drop at the edges the rx range is wider, but there's nothing to serch there, and also the sensitivity drop's just for your knlowledge it is also recive the FM BROADCAST of course with narrow deviation and you cant understand it, but it works, another rhing is that you can do the modification bt unsoldering all jumpers about 800MHZ band: I have the Service manual and in the layout and the partlist there are some components that dowsnt appear in the schematic im sure it got something do to do with the 800MHz, when i tried to finf them in the equipment, they were noy there, they are probably being assembled in some countries were listening to thee 800 is legal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------