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 modes, in a chassis about the size of a car stereo, and it still competes with radios released two decades after it. If you want one box that covers 160 meters through 70 centimeters without a second radio riding shotgun, this is one of the few used-market radios that still does that well.
Power Output by Band
Here’s the number that trips people up: 100 watts on HF and 6 meters, 50 watts on 2 meters, and only 20 watts on 70 centimeters. That UHF ceiling is less than half of what you get on VHF, and it matters more than the spec sheet makes it look. If you’re leaning on the 857D as your UHF repeater radio, especially from inside a vehicle or a building, 20 watts is going to show up as a noticeably weaker hit than a 50W mobile would give you on the same repeater. Not a dealbreaker, just budget for it.
MARS/CAP Mod Options
Like a lot of Yaesu radios from this era, the 857D has more than one MARS/CAP modification floating around, and they don’t all do the same thing. Depending on the hardware revision and firmware, you’re looking at anything from a menu-based unlock to a solder-point mod, and the resulting transmit range varies by variant. Worth knowing: one of the more common variants extends the radio’s range down far enough to reach into GMRS territory around 462 and 467 MHz. That doesn’t make transmitting there legal. GMRS is a licensed Part 95 service that requires FCC type-accepted equipment, and a modified amateur radio doesn’t qualify no matter how clean the signal is or how valid your GMRS license is. If you do a MARS/CAP mod, do it for its intended purpose and keep your GMRS traffic on a radio that’s actually certified for it. I go deeper on this in a dedicated post.
The Menu, Unfortunately
This is where the radio loses me a little. The 857D runs on a single-line display and a deeply nested numbered menu that wasn’t intuitive when it launched and hasn’t aged into intuitive since. Getting to some settings takes a specific hold-and-turn sequence that you either remember or you don’t, with no way to browse your way there by guessing. Put it next to the FT-891, which uses the same era of Yaesu design language but organizes its menu into clearly labeled categories on a proper multi-line display, and the 857D looks like the rough draft. If you’re coming from the 891 or the FTX-1, budget a real adjustment period.
Verdict
I’d still recommend the FT-857D, especially on the used market where it’s usually a bargain for what it covers. It earns its reputation as one of the best do-everything radios of its generation. That said, I ended up selling mine. Not having a waterfall made hunting and browsing SSB more of a chore than I expected, and needing a Digirig for digital modes was one more piece of hardware than I wanted to carry. If your operating leans heavily on digital modes with an app doing the frequency work, the 857D is a great fit. If you spend a lot of time tuning across the band by ear and eye, budget for that adjustment, or consider a radio with a built-in waterfall instead. I go into that decision in more detail in a separate post.