Monday, August 15, 2011

Further Learning About the FT 1000 MP V

 I was busy this weekend playing with the 1000 MP V, I had a really good read of the manual and managed to set the rig up to how I wanted it. There is an excellent website dedicated to the Yaesu FT 1000 MP and Mark V  which has now helped me out twice on either an issue or for general help. Interestingly this particular rig I have has been set to transmit out of the amateur bands, which for me is great when it comes to CB work. Living on a farm all the workers have CB in their tractors so it’s quite nice to be able to chat to them and should any emergency arrive they also know they can contact me via the radio.

But there’s a cautionary tale here which I have just had this morning; yesterday when contacting the farm community on the CB frequency I was using the FM mode and obviously had set the squelch set up high.
This morning I switched on the rig and tuned up on 30 meters having my usual hunt for any DX. As I was tuning down the band the receive went dead, the radio was still on but nothing was coming out of the speaker. This was happening intermittently just for a few seconds and then it would come back up. Panic, had I somehow broken the receive? After doing some thorough checks I was completely baffled and went to the website I have mentioned to see if there was an obvious answer I had missed. Hopefully you’ve guessed the problem; the squelch was still set high for the CB frequency!

I have taken the 30 meter Delta Loop antenna down and replaced it back with the inverted V. To be honest although a quieter antenna, the difference in receive was pretty small and to be fair already having a mast with the cobweb and the W3DZZ trap, the Delta Loop was a bit of an eye sore that was making the garden look like a telephone exchange! My family are pretty good when it comes to my hobby but even I realised that sometimes I can go a bit too far!

No comments:

Post a Comment