I’ve been scouting for a replacement for the TS-850 for a while now. Something maybe a little newer, but not one of the new rigs that puts most of the functions on a screen. Call me old, I like my knobs and buttons. I don’t like wading through menu layers to get to stuff I change fairly often. I never did fall in love with the TS-850. It’s a fine rig and all… but it replaced a TS-930S, and while I appreciate the relief from the constant power supply issues, the receiver never has really measured up. I know that’s a high bar to set.
At first I was thinking about the FT-1000 series, Yaesu’s flagship contesting radio from the late 90s through the mid 2000s. The original FT-1000 and FT-1000D was superseded by the FT-1000MP, and then by the Mark V in two different flavors – the 200W Mark V FT-1000MP, and the 100W Mark V FT-1000MP Field. Nice radios, but they’re all 20+ years old. I also considered the Kenwood TS-590SG, a much more modern, DSP based rig. Then there’s the Elecraft K3. A new K4 is nice, but at nearly $7K it’s just not in the cards. the K3 is highly regarded and falls somewhere in the $1500-2500 range, depending on the many, many options and filters available for it. I thought about the TS-950SDX, but pretty much nobody recommends that – it seems like a continuation of the 850 with audio DSP.
I’d pretty much decided on the K3, albeit a little reluctantly. Some of the functions seem a little more menu driven than I’d like, but it’s pretty much universally loved. I hadn’t pulled the trigger yet, waiting on a deal I liked. What I wanted would cost me over $1K, probably closer to $2K, and I wanted to find the “sweet spot” of all the options I wanted, but at a good price.
Then someone listed an FT-1000MP for $600, all in, shipped to my doorstep. I just couldn’t pass that up. I bought it. It arrived. I fixed one problem – a dead CAT serial port that took a $1.30 chip to fix. It’s awesome, I love it. It exceeded my expectations. I used it for SSB, for FT8, even some CW. Life was good. Sure, a Mark V Field would be nice, but I was happy.
Then someone listed a Mark V FT-1000MP – as-is, for $200. Wait, what? He was up front about his reasons. He’d had some problem or other, fixed it, everything worked until he closed up the front panel, then the buttons and LEDs quit working. He took it apart again, found a cable loose or something, closed it up, and still had a dead front panel. He decided to call it quits and sell. Well, I’d just been in the front panel of an FT-1000MP – nearly identical – days before, and encountered a very similar problem that turned out to be knucklehead me not recognizing the “zero insertion force” (ZIF) flat cable connectors, and getting a couple of them partially seated. On those connectors there’s a latching piece that has to be pulled out to seat the cable, then pushed in. These things were designed to be assembled by tiny little Japanese girls in a factory, not mucked about with by my giant ham fists. I figured I could fix this $200 rig and have an updated, newer, fancier version of what I had just fallen in love with. So I bought it.
The UPS boxes arrived yesterday. The rig has its own power supply; the 200 W final amp needs a 30 V supply, so it comes with an FP-29 switching 12/30 V power supply. I put it in the bench and, sure enough, the display was OK (if a bit dim) but the buttons and LEDs were unresponsive. It did take longer than I thought to get it working, but in the end I did. It wasn’t a flat cable; it seems to have been just the routing of the high-voltage wires for the display’s CCFL backlight tube. Last night I put it on the air, and I have to say, the upgrades to the original MP are pretty impressive. I don’t know that I will even need to move the extra IF filters I bought for the first rig over to it.
So, now my tiny operating desk has a TS-850, and above it a shelf with an FT-1000MP and a Mark V FT-1000MP stacked on top. A little overkill, sure. And yes, I’m sure I’ll sell two of these rigs. I had been keeping an eye out for a Mark V Field, the 100 W version, because my remote antenna tuner is rated for 125 W maximum, but as it turns out the 200 W Mark V has a convenient menu setting to set the maximum output power to 200, 75, or 10 W. It also has the typical 100/50 W switch inside the rig, same as the TS-850 and the older FT-1000MP, but I don’t know what that will actually do on this rig. I have the radio set for 75W max. Is it perfect? No; it has one mismatched knob from a different Yaesu rig that isn’t obvious but I’d like to replace it some day. It’s pretty nice cosmetically, though, and seems perfectly functional. I spent an hour exploring different features, some I’ll use and some I may not, and there are still some I haven’t tried out. The transition from the older rig to the Mark V is almost as different as going from the TS-850 to the FT-1000 was.
If someone had told me a year ago that I’d have a stack of radios like this on that desk, I’d have thought they didn’t know me very well… but when things line up, they line up, and here we are. Now I just need to get the 850’s ALC issue fixed so it’s working properly again, and get it listed for sale. Then I’ll pull the filters from the FT-1000MP and list that one, along with a few other pieces of gear I don’t need. Meanwhile, I’m exploring a newfound enjoyment of chasing POTA stations and finding new DX countries on FT8 and FT4.
