Yaesu FT290

[Wendymott]

Well with the aid of Terry and David, I Now have two operational radio's. With the mods I made to radio 1... I can generate 5W FM into a 50R dummy load, however this has been backed off to 3.5W, as I dont want to over drive the PA in SSB mode.
Radio 2 was a bit more of a challenge, where David's scrapper came into its own. R2 had an iffy mode switch, very noisy, and after some "tail chasing" decided it needed replacing..its sealed thus no chance of getting any cleaner into it. So thanks to David, I did a switch swap. Plus a Dual gate fet replacement.............. Oh yes a TOTAL re alignment.... the person I bought it off stated.. "spares or repair"...he neglected to say.. EVERY coil, trimmer and preset had been "adjusted" when all that was wrong was the post amp of the PLL oscillator was duff. Ah well.. not much you can do...
One other mod I made to both was to rewire the DC input socket, which is wired at -V centre pin...As I dont want the internal battery set up, it was changed to + centre pin. This then cancels any confusion in the supply department.
One other point to note... due to the age of this radio.. it is all "Hairpin leaded" components.. packed so tight you wonder who designed it. Service wise a heat gun is essential to remove some components as the pcb is PTH "plated through hole". I replaced some components, that were impossible to relocate with SMD parts.

[Terry_VK5TM]

Re the power supply socket change - remember to grind off the markings on the the back underneath it - other wise uncertainty will remain if somebody else uses it.

[Wendymott]

Good plan Terry... I had already marked it as such..... both workers are now modified

[Wendymott]

In the last couple of days, I have been dismantling one of the "poorly" 290's. And its quite a job. Who or whom ever designed the main pcb, must have had some sleepless nights..It is literally jammed with components.. not a spare mm2. To strip the pcb it is impossible without a heat gun. The PTH pads especially the ground pads really suck up the heat, and no matter what you use. All the leaded components are "hairpin" formed thus allowing such a compact assembly. This is where it gets virtually impossible to fault find. If you are working on one without another, to locate the actual component, it is near impossible, as I have not found any pcb component ident data, except for the alignment pages. showing the key adjustments..
Another discovery was...the amount of "interconnect" wires..... NO wire Links.. just pvc coated wires everywhere. This is where I have been going wrong... my pcb designs are based on T/C links to get power from A to B.....thus the pcb's are larger than need to be...neater yes...but space wasting. Lesson learnt.

[Terry_VK5TM]

So something like this might be a help?

[Wendymott]

Thanks Terry......will be a BIG help with my next foray into the innards

[Jon_G4MDC]

Remember seeing in one of these and thinking "how do they build it and make any money from it ?".

[SiriusHardware]

My FT290-R2 cost me not much short of £500 when it was a current product. I don't think they did too badly out of us.

[Wendymott]

Jon... One wonders..... the number of inductors, Xtals and filters.... plus all the semi's.. may have been a "loss leader" to get into the market.

[Terry_VK5TM]

The amateur market was (and still is) too small to run "loss leaders".

They would have made money on each and every product they sold.

[Radio Wrangler]

At the time the FT290 would have been Yaesu's biggest seller by some margin, and well ahead of the other makers.

David

[Wendymott]

So that theory has been well and truly shot to pieces

[G0HZU_JMR]

Rummaging in my stash of old and dusty 2m radios I still have a Standard C58 multimode and a Yaesu FT290R mk1. The C58 has similar features as the FT290R and is even smaller.

I think they both had a similar selling price in the magazine adverts way back in 1981.

[G6Tanuki]

It's interesting to note that the 'Standard' company palled-up with Vertex [who made a lot of professional/commercial two-way-radio gear] and eventually merged with.... Yaesu!

I've got a little "Yaesu" VX150 hand-held radio here, dating from the end of the last-century; it is the same chassis as was sold to the commercial market as the VS150, VS being "Vertex-Standard".

[Terry_VK5TM]

Does anybody per chance have a paper copy of the schematics for the FT 290 and could either do or arrange for it to be scanned at 300dpi or more please in BMP or SVG format? Or even sell it on so I can scan it.

Even if it was scanned as seperate overlapped pages, I can join it together.

Along with Wendy, I now also have a '290 and although mine is fully working, it would be nice to have a really good copy - 'just in case'.

All the ones I have been able to track down on the 'net are either low quality or have a flaw of some sort right in a critical part of it.

[G0HZU_JMR]

I did a similar thing many years ago and joined some scanned pages together to make up a huge image of the schematic. However, I only had access to someone else's scan and it wasn't good quality to start with.

I think I posted it onto the FT290R user group about 10 years ago but I'm not sure if it is still online. I had a quick look and couldn't find it. However I did upload it to the link below a while back but you have to click on the image to zoom in to see the best detail.

https://www.qsl.net/g/g0hzu//RF%20Tr...90_schem12.jpg

If I'd been given a decent set of scanned images it would have been a lot better in terms of quality. However, I did find it useful when I first bought my FT290 on ebay. In those days they could still be bought for sensible money. I paid £36 delivered for mine although I did have to sort out the s-meter circuit as the AGC/s-meter were stuck at full scale. I got fed up trying to navigate the FT290R schematic on separate pages so I stitched them together in a huge composite image.

[Terry_VK5TM]

I got that one thanks Jeremy from an archive of the old Yahoo group (The Electric Handbag).

Unfortunately, as you say, once you zoom in it goes to and turns in to a blurred mess.

I also got a pdf (3 separate pages) which you can zoom in quite way and it stays mostly legible, but there are some spots where it is very indistinct, like where things on page folds tend to lose clarity.

I did try to join The Electric Handbag in it's new home on Groups IO but it looks like it has fallen by the wayside unfortunately as I didn't get any response to the request.

[mickm3for]

Hi this holds up well if you zoom in mick

[Wendymott]

Sorry Mick. Its the same one.... what we need is a member of Yaesu staff that worked on the thing and "borrowed" a copy.. until then... we struggle.

[Restoration73]

This version may be better

http://www.foxtango.org/ft-library/F...ies/FT290R.pdf
also
http://www.foxtango.org/ft-library/F..._schematic.pdf