W1GUH
05-26-2009, 03:20 AM
The good news is...it REALLY gets out, and 20m was wide open to E. Europe on Saturday.
Driving up to Boston from NY on Saturday I worked...
Bosnia
Croatia
Poland
Slovenia
Ukraine (on CW)
ALL were with very nice signal reports. Of note was to Slovenia the guy I talked to, Tom, practically gushed over my signal strength, and to/from the Ukraine it was a 2 way honest 599 on CW.
Don't think hamsticks get out? Think again. Those results say otherwise.
Now for the bad news about the '857. You have to do some adjusting for optimum audio. I've gotten sporadic reports of "muffled" audio. They haven't been frequent, but they were there and it was kind of a stumper trying to figure out why I got them. I found out today. I checked into an AM conversation going in in the AM window and got the same report. So I googled "FT-857 AM" and was led directly to a thread from the AM community about the subject. What I learned was that Yaesu's stock mic levels are WAY too high, resulting in way too much compressor action. BINGO!
So..how to fix this? Hook up a 'scope. One glance at an envelope display would've told me the same thing without the agony of negative on-air reports. Without a scope...turn back the mic level to no more than 25. The 50 mic levels for all modes is too high.
I'll report what levels I wound up with when I've set up my radio.
Finally...if the stock levels are too high, at least they don't result in distortion and crappy sounding audio. That's a plus. The minus is it's not optimum, and you can improve the audio much by setting things up with a 'scope.
Driving up to Boston from NY on Saturday I worked...
Bosnia
Croatia
Poland
Slovenia
Ukraine (on CW)
ALL were with very nice signal reports. Of note was to Slovenia the guy I talked to, Tom, practically gushed over my signal strength, and to/from the Ukraine it was a 2 way honest 599 on CW.
Don't think hamsticks get out? Think again. Those results say otherwise.
Now for the bad news about the '857. You have to do some adjusting for optimum audio. I've gotten sporadic reports of "muffled" audio. They haven't been frequent, but they were there and it was kind of a stumper trying to figure out why I got them. I found out today. I checked into an AM conversation going in in the AM window and got the same report. So I googled "FT-857 AM" and was led directly to a thread from the AM community about the subject. What I learned was that Yaesu's stock mic levels are WAY too high, resulting in way too much compressor action. BINGO!
So..how to fix this? Hook up a 'scope. One glance at an envelope display would've told me the same thing without the agony of negative on-air reports. Without a scope...turn back the mic level to no more than 25. The 50 mic levels for all modes is too high.
I'll report what levels I wound up with when I've set up my radio.
Finally...if the stock levels are too high, at least they don't result in distortion and crappy sounding audio. That's a plus. The minus is it's not optimum, and you can improve the audio much by setting things up with a 'scope.