I managed to find enough money to order the new AF unit for my VX-7R. Last night, I looked over the invoice from Yaesu and noticed the sales staff forgot to add my apartment number to the shipment. Whoops. A minor issue to be sure, but I really didn’t want the shipment to be delayed. As soon as I woke up this morning, I got in contact with FedEx to try to amend my address. Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do directly for me; the amendment has to come from Yaesu. Problem is, Yaesu wouldn’t be open for another 3 hours, and the part was already on the truck for final delivery. In the meantime, I put a note on the door down-stairs asking the driver to buzz my apartment, hoping they would comply if they came before Yaesu could amend my address. Just as I was placing the call to Yaesu, my buzzer went off. I now had the part in my hands!
As soon as I got back up-stairs, I unpacked the part, reassembled the radio, and put it on the charger. At first, I just about freaked out as I couldn’t get the radio to power on. I was really worried I had done something to completely ruin it. But then I remembered, this thing has circuit breakers in it to protect itself from shorts and overloads. I probably just accidentally shorted something last time I was working in it. In a last-ditch attempt, I unplugged the charger, removed the battery, pressed the power button, plugged it back in with the battery still out, and tried powering it up again. It worked! I successfully recalled how to reset the breakers. I turned it off, inserted the battery, and it started charging.
I let it charge for a few minutes, then unplugged it and turned it on. First thing to test was reception. The radio was tuned to the local repeater, and I was getting a lot of noise. Checked the squelch, and it was set to 0. Turned it up to 3, and the radio went quiet. So far so good. I tuned it to 162.50 MHz, where I should hear the WNG676 NOAA Weather Radio station loud and clear. Sure enough, there it was. Loud, clear, and pinging my signal meter to full, as expected.
Next was to test transmitting. I tuned back to the KØCJD repeater, and asked for a radio check. It took several calls before I got a response, but that didn’t surprise me. The repeater is usually pretty quiet that time of day. Funny part is, this is where the battery died. I had to use the radio I’m borrowing from a friend to respond. However, I was concerned that my scanner, and my friend’s radio wasn’t breaking squelch until after I finished my transmissions. After letting the radio charge for an hour, I looked at the power setting on my radio… I was putting out the full 5 watts. I was probably just over-whelming their receivers with the close proximity and high power. Turned it down to 0.05W output, and tried again on 146.550MHz simplex. This time, both the scanner and my friend’s radio broke squelch and I could hear myself loud and clear! I can now rest assured that my radio is fully functional again.
