So. What do people think the best bang for buck 817 upgrade is?? With the dollar heading north again (if you believe the financial review 🙂 it might be time to order some bits from OS again. My current thinking is a Collins Mechanical filter of some Type/Style/Manufacturer. On my Sota activations. The most common…
I can’t recommend you buy this product, Not yet anyway. It’s not an issue with the device, the build quality or the actual product operation. I cannot recommend you buy the product because of the poor purchasing experience. I wondered before my recent camping trip and first real try of QRP portable (non sota) if…
I often joke I’ve programmed the morse keyer memory on my radio to ask “do you have a microphone” but… Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in the sun playing around with the ft817 and with my Dinkey morse key and got brave enough to put out some calls. *initially without much luck. But I videoed…
Digital modes on the radio are a bit of a Black art. In my quest to expand my radio options while camping. I discovered and purchased an 817-iPad interconnect cable and it arrived just before our trip. I’ll expand on that in another post, essentially it’s signalink type device for my iPhone/iPad. I haven’t really…
In an effort to better understand the performance of my ft817 and the ZM-2 ATU, I’ve been exploring different random length wire antennas while camping. I read an article posted on a sota forum about random wire lengths and how to choose an efficient length, this article talks about the importance of choosing a length…
Everyone kept saying “knob, knob, knob” about my ft817, i didn’t know what they meant, so I googled “817 knob” and discovered the Kranker Knob from the W4RT shop. This store has all kinds of ways for me to spend my money on the FT817! I ordered a knob, just on $30 with postage and exchange…
I discovered a critical flaw in the FT817 almost the first time I used it (a flaw for me anyway) the box is great, but has no built in ability to raise the display/control at a nice angle easily, it works a treat vertically, resting on the heat sink extension on the bottom of the…
My morse code skills suck. REALLY REALLY Suck!!. I passed my morse exams in the mid – late 1990’s and then only just. I did enough to qualify for the exam. And have never actually had a morse QSO on ham radio. I do use morse today. I use it to decode beacons and ID…