Basic walk through on ft891 a great compact but complicated rig

Love mine as well. Great portable rig for POTA. Menus not difficult and are primarily 'set once and no need to go back and tinker. Honestly, as a primarily CW op, its fantastic, especially on receive.

 

I absolutely love my FT-891. I was torn between the FT-891 or the Icom 7300 to serve as a base and portable rig. With a wife and family to support, I couldn't justify buying both rigs, so after watching several Youtube videos and reading different reviews claiming the FT-891 was about the best radio under $1000, and almost as good if not better audio quality as the 7300, I bit the bullet and got the FT-891. I have zero regrets, and it definitely lives up to the hype. I do not know why so many people think the menu is so complicated. Within a few hours of reading the manual, and setting up the radio to my liking, it was a breeze to use and very intuitive. I would say 95% of the radios settings are "set them and forget them." Also, take advantage of the 3 user programmable buttons on the front. My only gripe, which is no big deal, is the DNR must be reset every time you change bands. I have the DNR set as a quick set button so no big deal, just annoying. Take the time to learn the menu before bashing the radio!

 

That is exactly what i did for ft8. Everything from 160m up to 6m is programed in memory.
I dont use cat control. Just straight up signalink and a small acer spin convertible laptop tablet for portable or whatever. The memory is definitely a must . Good point.

 

Data or digital is narrow and odd when i used it that way. It was not for me. For ft8 it was not as good as usb. So as stated previously. I programmed every ft8 frequency into memory. Problem solved. Sad that cat control cant even force the usb lsb change.

 

One of my friends in the MARS program has one of these. Gotta say it's a pretty nice rig ... especially for the price. I really enjoyed operating it. It just kind of weirded me out that it seems like the 891 tries to "figure out" what frequency you mean when you put it into digital service. I noticed this with my FT-920. I really love that rig .... (for the price), so I wound up ignoring the digital menu settings and just put everything through the microphone jack. No problems since! I know a few others who use the Yaesu rigs for digital ops and they love them. So (as usual) I might be doing something wrong!

 

Excellent rig at a good price when you consider 20+ year old Icom 706 rigs and similar are being touted at outrageous prices on Ebay.
G3SEA/KH6
Mele Kalikimaka !

 

Superb little radio. I have landed some great DX contacts with it. Prefer it over my 7300

 

What many of you ought to say is “I bought the wrong radio for my operating style/mode”.. Your mistake is not Yaesu’s fault.

 

I'm using mine as a base rig. Receive is good, no complaints on transmit audio. Works great with my ATAS-120A antenna that's mounted on my metal roof. Price was exceptional (less that $600). Menu is a breeze. It's a keeper...

 

What is wrong with the menus? They are numbered. They are named. You don't have to decipher a code to figure them out. How is this difficult? If there is something you use a lot it could probably be added to the quick buttons at the bottom. You guys are making so much more of this than what it is....

If you are literate, there is nothing "hard" about using this radio.

 

There seems to be a rash lately of "reviews" of equipment being posted by people with little or no hand-on experience with they're reviewing.

 

The "LAP" is an indicator that you have a cable connected to the Linear Amp control port / circuit. In my case, it is a cable that is connecting to the Tunematic antenna controller.
73 - KM4RT

 

Question for FT-891 owners:

I had one of these with a completely awful audio bug generated by poor RF design - digital hash on the input lines every time CAT control pinged the rig for frequency information (more than once per second). It occurred with the audio volume all the way off and was unfixable. I won't go into the story which included direct communication with Yaesu management level in Japan, but the result is that Yaesu did such a horrible job with customer service (and was unmoving in requests for problem fixes) that I've moved to other companies permanently.

Here's a perfect example of the problem:



But I am curious - those who own it now: do you use CAT control, and can you hear any problems? Did they fix it? When?

73
W1PJE

 

Mine does not do this. I was so worried about these reports, I corresponded with Gigaparts and then Yaesu to ask about it. It seems that the bug was fixed at some point, and only early versions of the radio had this problem (even then, it was sporadic, with lots of them not doing it). I didn't get technical details, but was assured that current production didn't have the issue. I took the leap, and have been happy with it.

 

The truth is, when you stack an antenna tuner and a sound card interface on top of the 891 you've got a pile of stuff almost as big as the FT-991A. Just look past this turkey from Yaesu and go straight to the 991A. It's a much better HF rig, plus you get all-mode VHF/UHF as a bonus.

(Oh, and the IC-7100 is a darned good rig, too.)