Category: UHF/VHF

  • Installing a Ham Dual-Band Mobile Radio in Your Vehicle

    Part of our Building Your First Ham Radio Station guide. Installing a dual-band mobile follows the same basic principles as any mobile radio install, and getting the fundamentals right the first time saves you from chasing mystery problems down the road. Power: Straight to the Battery Run power leads directly to the battery rather than…

  • VHF/UHF Weak Signal SSB: Beyond the Local Repeater

    Part of our Getting On The Air guide. Most hams experience VHF and UHF exclusively through FM repeaters, and that is a perfectly good way to use those bands, but there is an entirely different style of operating happening on the same bands that most repeater users never encounter. Why Weak Signal SSB Exists FM…

  • LoRa APRS: A Different Take on Long-Range Tracking

    Part of our Getting On The Air guide. LoRa APRS blends two technologies that most hams already know separately, traditional APRS and LoRa radio hardware, into something that behaves a bit differently from either one on its own. How It Differs From Traditional APRS Standard APRS runs on 144.390 MHz in the US using AFSK-modulated…

  • MARS/CAP Mods on the Yaesu FT-857D: What They Actually Do and Where the Legal Line Sits

    Part of our The Yaesu FT-857D: The Complete Guide. What a MARS/CAP Mod Actually Is MARS stands for Military Auxiliary Radio System, a Department of Defense program that uses licensed amateur operators, MARS members, and Civil Air Patrol (CAP) operators to provide auxiliary communications support. MARS and CAP frequencies sit just outside the standard amateur…

  • The FT-857D as a Shack in a Box: Why It’s One of My Favorite SHTF Radios

    Part of our The Yaesu FT-857D: The Complete Guide. One Box, Every Band You’d Actually Need When I think through what a grab-and-go radio needs to do in an actual SHTF scenario, the list is short: reach the local repeater network, monitor and work HF for anything past line of sight, and do it all…

  • Taming the FT-857D’s Menu: A Practical Cheat Sheet

    Part of our The Yaesu FT-857D: The Complete Guide. Why This Radio’s Menu Fights You The 857D packs a genuinely deep set of features into a single-line display and a numbered menu tree, which was a reasonable design in its day and hasn’t aged gracefully. Settings are grouped by number rather than by plain-language category,…

  • Common FT-857D Problems and How to Fix Them

    Part of our The Yaesu FT-857D: The Complete Guide. ALC Clipping and Power Foldback on 40 Meters This is the complaint that comes up most in FT-857D circles: power output drops or the ALC meter spikes and clips specifically on 40 meters, even though other bands sound fine. It’s a well-documented calibration drift issue tied…

  • Buying a Used FT-857D: What to Check

    Part of our The Yaesu FT-857D: The Complete Guide. There Are No New Ones Left Yaesu discontinued the FT-857D in 2020. Every unit on the market today, whether it’s a dealer’s used listing or a private sale, is coming from someone’s shack or go-bag, not a warehouse. That changes how you should shop for one.…

  • Yaesu FT-857D vs FT-891, G90, FTX-1 Field, FTX-1 Optima, IC-7300 Mark II, and FT-817: Where Each One Actually Wins

    Part of our The Yaesu FT-857D: The Complete Guide. I get asked constantly how the FT-857D stacks up against the rest of the radios in my shack and go-bags, so here’s the honest rundown of where each one wins and where it doesn’t. Quick disclosure up front: I own and regularly use the FT-891, the…

  • Yaesu FT-857D Review: A Great All-Bander Held Back by Its Own Menu

    Part of our The Yaesu FT-857D: The Complete Guide. Still a Legit All-Bander I picked up the FT-857D for a great price and ran it in both the shack and the field kit, though it never rode in the Jeep. The reputation holds up. It’s a full HF/VHF/UHF all-mode radio, SSB, FM, and the data…

  • I Bought a Yaesu FT-857D for a Great Price. Here’s Why I Sold It

    I picked up a used FT-857D for a great price, ran it for a while, and decided it wasn’t for me. Here’s what’s genuinely good about it and why I sold it and went back to the FTX-1.

  • Yaesu FTM-300DR Review: A Compact Dual-Band Mobile Worth Considering

    Part of our Where to Spend Your Money guide. The FTM-300DR sits in an interesting spot in Yaesu’s lineup, compact enough to almost pass for an oversized handheld but built and marketed as a mobile radio with genuine System Fusion capability. Compact Footprint, Real Mobile Power Despite its smaller size compared to traditional mobile radios,…

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