blue box thief wrote:


Hi lamont,

Yes, I have read both sets of reviews from eham (also looked at QST, and, I think,
the PW review).

The most logical reason for the more 897 reviews is that radio has been out alot longer
(4-5 more years?) than the 450 (it was released sometime last year).

Does anyone have any first hand experience/opinions of either of these radios?

thanks


Just one, do NOT buy the D model of this radio, or its twin, the 857.
The only real change was they made it impossible to do the software mods
on it. To put it another way, if you have the 897 instead of the 897D,
you can easily add the 60m "channels" to normal memory locations after
doing the software mod.

That being said, both the D and non-D models have some serious hardware
issues, all of which are fixable. The processor isn't one, it's simply
a 100 gain op amp that starts to clip as you turn it up, no filtering,
no nothing. Fixable with 4 or 5 resistors and caps as I remember. The
finals bias currents are normally not set properly at the factory.
Simple to fix. The drivers, which are the FT817 finals, have the same
problem they did in the 817, they tend to blow up under certain
conditions. To be fair, it's very rare, and fixable with a voltage
regulator. The ALC time constant is way to fast, which causes dropouts
in during portions of words. This one is very easy to fix with a single
cap. There are some others that are less of a problem.

I own an 897 and an 857D, and they do not work at all alike on transmit,
though they are theoretically virtually identical. Both are very good on
receive for the design, and essentially the same. The 897 is great on
transmit, and the 857D is, to put it bluntly, absolute crap. I am
fairly certain that this is due to the bias on the finals, but will not
be able to confirm that until I can take it in for realignment. I will
do that, and then have the other mods done one at a time to see how the
transmit audio changes.

For more information on the 897/857, see the DG2IAQ document. I found a
copy on mods.dk. It may be available other places. It is very well done.

tom
K0TAR