13-11-2016, 10:29 PM
When I was a nipper and in shorts, I was loaned a Yaesu FRG7 (frog) and spent many a happy hour scanning the wavelengths. It was a sad day when it had to go back, and I really missed that radio.
Fast forward many years, and with gelt in my pocket a FRG7 came along my way. As usual with me, I buy things, put them on the "Rountuit" list and often forget about them.
I dug the radio out as I had recently been doing some aerial work and after a brief de-dust and internal inspection of the capacitors which were still in good condition and doing what they should be doing, she was plugged in. Again,old capacitors from the 70s and 80s are often fine but the mid 90s onwards examples often go futt with time, which says alot about modern manf methods, obsolesence built in.
One annoying bug with the frog, is that of the lock LED on the front panel which indicates if the internal synth is correctly set. However, on the frog, this is not intuitive in that the LED lit means out of synth and LED out means correctly set. A search on t'net found a mod for the frog in which the original red LED is replaced with a bi colour red/green example and a handful of parts on a pcb provide the switching. First attempt at fitment was a bust, I had mounted the pcb topside and for some reason the circuit board was causing interference. Closer inspection of the document revealed in a small picture that the author had mounted the pcb to the underside, just behind the tone switches and on re-location of the pcb to the position all was well.
So, with mod carried out and tested, it's back to listening.
Fast forward many years, and with gelt in my pocket a FRG7 came along my way. As usual with me, I buy things, put them on the "Rountuit" list and often forget about them.
I dug the radio out as I had recently been doing some aerial work and after a brief de-dust and internal inspection of the capacitors which were still in good condition and doing what they should be doing, she was plugged in. Again,old capacitors from the 70s and 80s are often fine but the mid 90s onwards examples often go futt with time, which says alot about modern manf methods, obsolesence built in.
One annoying bug with the frog, is that of the lock LED on the front panel which indicates if the internal synth is correctly set. However, on the frog, this is not intuitive in that the LED lit means out of synth and LED out means correctly set. A search on t'net found a mod for the frog in which the original red LED is replaced with a bi colour red/green example and a handful of parts on a pcb provide the switching. First attempt at fitment was a bust, I had mounted the pcb topside and for some reason the circuit board was causing interference. Closer inspection of the document revealed in a small picture that the author had mounted the pcb to the underside, just behind the tone switches and on re-location of the pcb to the position all was well.
So, with mod carried out and tested, it's back to listening.