My Brother-in-Law Gets a New Toy

My Brother-in-law is what I call an off on ham. He sometimes doesn’t touch the radio for months and then has a fling for a few weeks sort of catching up. He listens a lot, mainly on 14 meters and hates CW only uses SSB but sometimes he stretches to listening to Radio Ireland (IRE), going back to his roots. He has a very nice rig that I have already discussed about in this blog, a Yaesu FT 1000d, 200 watts, lovely receive, very smooth.

I came to his house last Friday, because my internet connection had gone down and I needed to work on my computer, typically we ended up playing radios on his 1000d and also looking at various websites for newer radios. We came across a well-known classifieds ads site with a particular ad I found, that was advertising an FT DX9000MP, something my Brother-In-Law had been wanting to purchase and own for some time, but thought the price for a new one was very steep. This was the 400 watts version, with every filter and button you could ever want, the flagship for Yaesu transceivers, basically the almighty god of radios.

The price was only £3750 something I personally would probably not consider for a radio as it’s out of my price league. But to the brother-in-law it was a bargain, he felt the 1000d although a good radio was getting a bit old!

He rang the advertised number with caution as sometime scams can happen, it was OK the guy was genuine. It turns out he was moving home and had no room for the 9000 so it had to go, he’d now set his sights on something new, a Flex radio.

Half an hour later after a good chat on the phone and with a bit of negotiation my brother-in-law was the new proud owner of an FT DX9000MP, the export packaging (which I'm told is very important)and a nice MD100 mic, a monitor and all the cables.

 

On Sunday the radio arrived, delivered in person by the old boy who was selling and his son who happened to be a ham as well.   Turns out his son had to help with 9000 as it was so big  and heavy, 26 kilos and that wasn’t the power supply and speaker or the monitor, they were all separate! He also had very good knowledge of how it was put together and more importantly how it operated.

I had never seen such a radio, it was massive. The instructions alone read like a thesis and would take at least a week to read through. I thought my 2000d was a little bit complicated with the menu but it was nothing to the 9000. I'm told If you want one off the shelf new it will cost you around a cool £7000, so no wonder my brother-in-law was like a kid in a candy shop.

Anyway long story short, we needed a full course in connecting and powering the thing up. But once up and running it was an absolute joy. Connected to a Hustler 6Btv antenna, 5/9s were constantly reported and operators were singing about the clarity. Then the ultimate test came a VK station with a big pile up. We wound up the beast to its full 400 watts and sent the call sign, Tim VK3TJK came back with a 5/6 report , not bad for a first QSO with Australia, I suspect there will be more of those to come!

A week later the Brother in Law is still working out what everything does and keeps ringing me to go on air so he can practise various filters positions and other settings, he's even thinking of taking up CW again!!