Welcome to the
Homebrew section
This section deals with the mods for the Yaesu FT-817. If you look at mods.dk you’ll find far too much mods and if you try em all, you’ll find out that a third doesn’t apply yo your version, another third ruins your rig and the one third that is left might work. So I decided to check them all, also looking at forums and other sites to find out which mod works and which doesn’t. The result of this crusade is that there are only a little few mods that really work:
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Battery modification
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Charging modification
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Plugprotector
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Rubber feet
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Tilt stand
Oh, so you are missing the
part where I cut some diodes to enter hidden frequencies and trnasmit on every
frequency available? Well, go find out yourself because I quit. I don’t want to
transmit on other frequencies than my own and when I go to America, than I’ll
find out how to transmit on their bands, if…
So I didn’t do the mod.
Looks to me like not useful and when thinking of it, it becomes more unuseful
every minute.
I guess I introduced the
mods enough, let’s start with making an honorable battery instead of the far
too expensive 900mAh pack.
Let me say first that when you
use the batterybox, don’t put in the btteries before you put the box into the
817. It doesn’t fit. When it is in the 817 you can easily put in the batteries.
But before you do that, you
need to cut the green wire. It is always a green wire. I startet cutting green
wires in every new device I got, but it doesn’t always work… Back to the
battery. Cutting the green wire makes the radio believe there are rechargable
batteries in it. When you look at an original batterypack, there is no green
wire too, so cut it. I desoldered it on the box-side and drew it back a
littlebit. Now it stays in the batterybox but makes no contact. Fixate with the
provided tape.
Now you batterypack is ready
for use. Put it into the 817 and be careful not to charge non-rechargable batteries!
I bought 2100mAh (!) batteries and it took me twice the charging time to get
them fully loaded. See next mod for this problem.
And when someone has a good
mod for a LiIon battery, just let me know. I don’t understand Yaesu made this
at once…
When charging, the current through the batteries is approximately 150mA and in ten hours this is too few to get the battery loaded. So you need to increase the current. I am not going to retype this mod since the outhor made a nice page. Don’t forget to do the double mod (charging and tricklecharging resistor) and buy 1/2W resistors of 4.7 and 47 Ohms.
This is the link:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/~e.houwertjes/charge817.html
Read the last section about
the tricklecharge!
This is not a mod for a buttplug or something like that. It is for the crazy little powerplug that Yaesu didn’t make very smart. They wanted to make a small rig. They looked for a small powerplug and… they found it! F*ck, this is not how they should. But, there is a solution to keep it in shape. Just bend a little peace of metal so it fits under the GND screw and lays over the powerplug. Now it can’t come out and the plug is protected from damage. Picture will follow.
Yaesu made this nice little rig with the smallest rubber feet ever: only 1nm wide! F*ck Yaesu again for not putting on some cheap rubber feet so the rig doesn’t slide off the table, dashboard etc. Boy oh boy, do I always have to do everything myself? Well, buy some rubber stickers that are not too large. You can get them at stores where they sell glass ornaments and such things. Check if they are sticky enough and buy some. Not only four but maybe eight or so. You might need them for other Yaesu rigs too 8-) .
Last but not least the last
thing Yaesu forgot to make (gee, did they have to meet a deadline or
something?): a tilt stand.
Coming up.