Mon DU1FV

Ring on the FT-77 knob Ring on the FT-77 knob As any rubber shoe or sneaker owner finds out soon enough rubber disentegrates with age but what happened to this forty year old radio vfo knob rubber is really something else. All of them by now have turned into a gooey mess and have to be removed for the radio to be usable at all. In the past, I have seen this happen to rubber belts on cassette tape decks. The problem with the now naked bare knob, is when you try to turn the knob faster, your index finger tends to slide off the knob. Not a good user experience. While I wait for a reasonably price VFO knob replacement I bought a $3 ring (probably pot metal just like the knob itself HIHI) at a sidewalk vendor in U.P. Town Center yesterday and today, I glued it to the old knob which had become difficult to use as my index finger keeps sliding off the bare knob. I used some tiny drops of super glue to tack it on and then used baking soda plus some drops of super glue on top of the baking sod

FT-77S  Personal restoration project, a vintage model released in 1982 by the  Japanese   Yaesu Musen Corporation.  Upon inspection, receive was poor and there was no TX at all. I took a look at the IF board and made some service manual adjustment for receive.  And now I can copy stations. After bringing out the scope I started poking around the IF unit and found some TX signals at the IF frequency. This signal is then fed to the RF Unit (shown below).     I then proceeded to checking out the RF Unit and found it had no TX ouput (which goes into the PA board).  So I had to backtrack. I started tracing the signal from the TX IF input J1011 of the RF Unit. Even before I started poking around the RF unit, I had a feeling that the print side of the board  might need reflowing at some places, (this yaesu came out in 1982!). Rather than blindly reflowing suspect joints, I just started tracing signals with the whole RF board upside down (print side up) and hanging in mid air with all connecto