W4FT on Amateur Radio

Failed RL6016 transmit relay - the black component at the top edge.

What do you do when your Yaesu FT-1000MP, your main base HF rig, that’s been a trusted partner for over a decade,  just doesn’t want to transmit?  As if antenna problems weren’t enough, now I have to perform surgery on my old friend.  Fortunately, this is a story with a happy ending.

For a while now, I’ve been experiencing some difficulty tuning my Yaesu FT-1000MP.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to resolve this problem, but was still able to operate reasonably well, so I carried on.  Anyways, on certain band segments, the internal tuner would hunt around for a long time but wouldn’t be able to tune the antenna for the frequency.  Sometimes, tuning up or down the band, letting the tuner lock in and then coming back would work, but it was annoying.  Recently, that changed completely. The radio would no longer tune at all.  Instead, it would just show an infinite SWR and the protection circuit would cut output power to milliwatts, as designed.  This is what happened when the radio was tuned to the antenna resonant frequencies, so it isn’t a mismatch issue.  (Yes, I know that most internal tuners only function if the SWR is 3:1 or less.) Read more…