![]() The rigs capabilities offer so much more than one band too high in the HF spectrum to be interesting for most of the eleven year cycle and its capabilities are such that once I had found a good one it became a permanent and most used fixture in my own shack. Indeed my first experience of the unit was just such an operator who had a six foot ‘Moonraker’ on the roof of his mk2 Escort and a modified FT707 on the passenger seat!! I suppose perhaps the memories of the thing being used to work far off places whilst hiding out in field gateways has helped generate part of my own perception and the mystique for the thing but there is so much more to it than that. Illegal modifications? Yes, the radio came out at the time of the early 80’s CB boom and found favour with 11m SSB operators, it was the natural next step from a Cobra or a NATO ‘sidebander’ I suppose with quite a few having the 10m frequency crystals being replaced with 11m or 26-27MHz crystals. The coloured LED bar for S meter/Power meter/ALC meter has had criticism over the years but as with anything once you get used to it its fine AND it seems to work progressively which cannot be said for all radios, some of them much newer!! Things to bear in mind include the Yaesu 4 pin power plug can fail (see Marketplace ‘wants’ !!) and with a modern Heil headset the AF output from the headphone socket is rather low and can distort when turned up.įT707’s crop up from time to time on good old ebay as well as at radio rallies, a lot were produced so finding a good one should not be too difficult and the rule of thumb seems to be that values for a well sorted and cared for radio that has not been abused or badly (or illegally) modified tend to be in the £100 - £120 region. There is a tendency for the frequency to drift 2-3kHz HF until things have warmed up (about half hour) which may be old components but interestingly a 1981 review in QST reported exactly the same occurence so its probably inherent with the rig. With careful juggling between the clarifier, IF width and RF gain its amazing just how much you can clean up reception on a crowded band – bear in mind this was produced 20 years before DSP and it still holds its own so to speak!įor an old radio there is not too much to really criticise. The receiver is amazingly sensitive, even more so than my much newer FT747 and the RF gain on a radio like this really comes into its own to attenuate strong signals as well as to minimise interference from adjacent frequencies. ![]() ![]() The rig in use is a pleasure to operate, this really is radio!! There is a chunky and very smooth to operate VFO knob controlling both a graduated scale and a digital display calibrated down to 0.1kHz, there is a switchable clarifier control and IF width control (very useful for tuning out QRM on difficult to hear stations), there is also VOX operation. A gripe when new was the lack of top band (1.8MHz) but amateurs are resourceful types and there is a very clever modification by G3TSO which can be found on the internet to install the band if you feel brave enough. The rig covered the amateur frequencies from 80m up to 10m (including the WARC bands on 10MHz, 18MHz and 24MHz) on AM, CW wide, CW narrow, USB and LSB (all switchable – no memory channels or automatic defaults or menus here!). Yaesu launched two versions of the radio, the low power (<10w) FT707S which lacked the rear mounted heat sink and cooling fan, and the high power (<100w) FT707. There was also a range of matched accessories for the unit including the choice of dedicated low or high output power supplies with integral speaker, antenna matcher and an external memory VFO. In retrospect the rig has built up quite a following being reliable, powerful (100w PEP on SSB) and with its classic looks still ‘cuts the mustard’ in my view. Reviews of the rig at the time varied but generally it was felt to be a good quality mobile radio but unsurprisingly better suited to mobile use than as a base station. Flicking back through amateur radio publications of the time (circa 1981) the FT707 typically retailed for £569 which to be honest compares favourably with the FT857 now (particularly if you take into account 27 years of inflation).
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