AmateurRadio.com

When I popped some dry cells in the FT790 the other day, I noticed that the springs in the battery compartment were not sufficient to keep the batteries pushed together. I emailed Yaesu but they had no spares of the battery box but did point me in the direction of some companies that could help.

However reading around last night, I saw an idea which inspired me to a possible solution. Someone on a forum had put some washers in between their batteries to keep the tension in the battery box.

I didn’t have any suitable washers but this morning I headed to Homebase and had a look around. I came home armed with a couple of packs of ‘Repair washers’ which looked suitable. An initial effort of inserting the washers to ‘pack’ the batteries was unsuccessful. I then sat down with the meter to understand what was happening.

It took a few minutes but it turned out to be a corroded connection that I hadn’t spotted. I cleaned that up and put the batteries and washers back. Success!

And of course, almost to the second, my iPad pinged with an email from HiFiSSB who had a battery box that they could let me have!

So, with the exception of a bit of a sloppy mode switch, the FT790 is now exactly how I want it!