I took my Yaesu FTM-300D on a bit of a ride today! I had been intending to do the MARS mod on it for a while and after reading some instructions and watching a video, I finally cracked it open.
I backed up my setting to an SD card and went to work. To be fair, I didn’t even break out the soldering iron. It was so easy to just snap off the resistor that I would have probably done more damage had I tried heat.
Unfortunately, it was not without some issues. Once I hooked the radio back up, I tried to restore from my back up and continued to receive errors. Basically all SD card operations were giving an error. Not good.
I moved on to just plain radio operation. I tuned in to a local repeater and hit the “DX” button to lock it to FM … and the operating mode indicator just starts flashing. Not good.
Going even more simple, I tuned to a simplex frequency and could transmit, but not receive.
At this point, I’m feeling pretty crappy. I’m sure that I just bricked my radio. I take it back out of the truck to the work bench and pull the cover off again. There’s a piece that looks like a heatsink stuck to the foam on lid. I don’t see that it was connected anywhere, so I just set it aside.
Multiple attempts and I’m still getting nowhere. SD card functions are screwy. Once I hit “DX” it loses its mind. I get some channels programmed in, but scanning just kinda stops at seemingly random intervals.
That heatsink had to go somewhere, surely it wasn’t just stuck to the foam on the lid. After looking at it, there was a wide flat connector that matched up to the main board. I put it back in place and I have my radio back!
I even managed to dig up a backup of my memory slots! I’m back in business. As the picture shows, it’s still on my desk, but sliding it back in the truck is just a minute or two.
I am wrestling with keeping the FTM-300D here at the desk and putting that cool old IC-28H in the truck instead.