EB5AGV's Workbench: Yaesu FT-847 restoration

This page is devoted to the restoration of my Yaesu FT-847 transceiver. I hope you enjoy it!

I got it from eBay some months ago... description was not too accurate and I ended up with a damaged rig (mostly physical damage) with some parts missing. Seller refunded part of the purchase price so final price was not bad and I had some cash to buy the needed spares :-)

Page INDEX

Unit as received

This is what I found once I opened the box...

There were cracks all around the front panel:

But this was the worst damage:

Not all was bad!. There was an extra CW filter installed:

But everywhere, thre were surprises... internal fuse was missing. Bad finals perhaps :-(?

VHF and UHF power amps seemed in good shape, if a bit dusty:

Now the front panel PCB... there was some job done to the power switch, as a trace had burned and was replaced this way:

Fan was also pretty dirty... not unusual, as it is always running in this rig:

Now I found more untidy jobs in the front panel PCB:

And on the back panel... a nicely damaged UHF connector:

First works

All in all, unit seemed complete and in reasonable electrical shape. So I fixed all what could be done, as lousy soldering jobs, power switch cabling and so on.

Here you have some pictures of the process.

This is the condition of the HF power amplifier and filter area before cleaning:

And now, after cleaning... a little better, right :-)?

OK, so now with some electrical work. First, front panel should be dismantled:

First thing to fix was the power switch:

This was the original work:

Then I duplicated the switch circuit, to prevent contact burning, and replaced the bare wire with an insulated one:

After these works, unit was fired up... and it worked!!!

More extensive works

So unit was working fine but, physically, it was awful. I tried to get new parts from Yaesu but main one I needed, front panel, was obsolete.

I asked for help in the FT-847 Yahoogroup and got some hints: there could be some spares available at Yaesu UK!. A gentleman fron UK bought it on behalf of me and sent it to me :-)

So I had a new front panel but still not the other parts, as the power switch, some damaged rubber knobs, all missing screws and so on. I sourced them in Spain, at the Yaesu distributor, but it took several months to arrive.

Here you have the unit with the new front panel on top: