The FT-2980R is a beast of a transceiver putting out up to 80W FM on 2m. From spending a little time using it for 2m simplex nets and whatnot it is an excellent radio; it's the best 2m FM receiver I own and (anecdotally) an S-point “better” when compared to my other radios (FT-8800R, FT-857D, FTM-300D etc). S1 stations which were unreadable on my other sets come through clearly on the 2980R as it “seems” more sensitive and selective; impact from local QRM is also much reduced. When running full power the case gets extremely hot very quickly and on a 30W rag-chew the case still becomes maximum-touch-hot - but for long runs below 20W it's very happy.

The design is, all told, extremely simple and elegant. On the TX chain We have an analogue amplifier and filter for the microphone audio, and mixing in the CTCSS tone is a simple resistor network. This is then fed to a “clever DAC chip” Q1043 (which also generates various analogue control voltages for mic gain, tuning varactors etc, more on that chip later!) which controls the deviation, then out to a VCO. On RX we have a pair of crystal filters after the first IF to strip out unwanted mixer products, and two crystal filters on the second IF for wide (-6dB 12KHz) and narrow (-6dB 9KHz), an RC filter for de-emphasis and all that is fed directly into an audio amplifier to the speaker. There is plenty of other voodoo for DCS, decoding WX broadcasts and such but the bits we're interested in are just a lesson in how to design a nice radio.

The service manual is excellent; alignment and power / deviation adjustments are made through the front panel in service mode; setting the power levels to 6dB increments (e.g. ~1/5/20/80W) or adjusting the power to give 25W ERP is simple. Using an IC-705 as a reference receiver the transmitted signal has no horrendous key-up transients (a la FT-1500M) and the wideband PLL phase noise is extremely low.

For some reason Yaesu didn't put a 6-pin mini-DIN socket on the back; plenty of folks have used this for APRS via the MIC / speaker sockets but we want flat audio! Plenty of options out there of course but the 2980R is a nice rig, so this article addresses this shortcoming :) The radio performs beautifully and has, so far, been tested up to 4k8 GFSK IL2P-CRC.

• Pin 9 of Q1028 is the output from the discriminator
• Junction between C1122 and C1123 is de-emphasised audio before the RX-MUTE circuit
• Junction between C1276 and Q1003 is the DC-coupled input to the modulator (this doesn't work)
• Pin 12 of Q1043 is the input to the multifunction DAC (this does work!!)
• Tap on the MIC socket to then be processed / emphasised by Q1049 / Q1043 etc
• PTT is achieved by grounding PIN1 of the MIC connector (front panel board)

The radio is beautifully designed and assembled; desoldering of the PA and rear RF connector is required to lift out the main PCB. The appropriate tap points are on both sides of the main PCB and the components are mostly very tiny 0402 and 0603 parts. The VCO is contained under a heavily soldered-down metal can.

• A 90W vacuum desoldering gun was used to desolder the SO239 connector from the board, it needed a lot of heat
• There is a tiny capacitor on the board next to the SO239 solder points, be careful!
• The front panel assembly must be removed before the main PCB as a couple of capacitors on the front PCB prevent lifting out the main PCB
• The main PCB must be slid forwards slightly to clear the external speaker jack from its cutout on the rear of the case

This radio had me somewhat perplexed for a while when attempting to inject audio into the transmit path. My first effort was to tap into the output of our DAC chip, Q1043, in an attempt to drive the modulator directly, but this effort was fruitless; for some reason the transmitted audio had lost much of its high frequency components and was completely undecodable by the reference receiver! I can only assume there are some oddities to the output impedance of the DAC chip, and it was loading down the audio injected after it. Perhaps removing the AC coupling capacitor in between the DAC and the VCO would work, but I wanted to retain the ability to use the radio as intended.

Attempt 2 at injecting audio was completely successful; though I don't fully understand the role of the DAC chip it appears that it produces a variety of control voltages to operate various parts of the radio. It also appears to contain various VCA / buffer amplifiers; one of these is used to take the mixed audio / CTCSS signal and drive the VCO via a VCA / buffer in order to control the deviation. Tapping directly to the input of the DAC chip, after the point the pre-emphasised speech and CTCSS tone have been mixed, produced a lovely transmit signal. Success!!

As there's potentially an awful lot of RF floating around inside the case I decided to use RG174 to tap both the audio inputs. It seems that Yaesu have gone to great lengths to shield and earth-bond this radio internally so it seems prudent to do the same. Receive audio is probably just fine but it may be a good idea to include a few pF from output to ground at the rear connector.

DC-coupled audio into the Q1043 VCA/buffer was done through a bit of RG178 - there is a dirty great big ground pad to solder the braid to.

The de-emphasised audio output appears on the rear side of the PCB, tapped after the filter network post-C1122 and before the AF MUTE squelch control Q1034

The discriminator output was tapped from the Q1028 side of C1098, it's an easier solder-job to access the cap rather than the IC pin

The MIC audio input was tapped into pin 1 of the MIC connector on the front PCB and the PTT line was tapped onto pin 2 of the MIC connector on the front PCB.

Drilling out the external speaker hole provided enough space to fit a mini-DIN socket, held in with a gob of epoxy. The pins on the rear of the socket are close to, but not touching the board and once the front panel is removed the board can still be removed by sliding it forwards (after desoldering stuff of course!). There was also enough space below the DIN socket to drill another hole for the 1200/9600 audio input switch.

The SO239 socket was also replaced with an N-Female socket, the one provided by M0MAT fits perfectly. Why SO239 sockets are still appearing on VHF / UHF radios is beyond me…

A wire bridge was inserted in place of the speaker socket to enable the internal speaker, a job usually done by the speaker jack.

More to come

More to come

de M0MZF, April '25