{"id":198,"date":"2026-08-26T14:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T19:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/?p=198"},"modified":"2026-08-26T14:15:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T19:15:23","slug":"ft-897-deaf-on-vhf-uhf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/?p=198","title":{"rendered":"FT-897 deaf on VHF\/UHF"},"content":{"rendered":"I was recently contacted by a new ham that purchased an FT-897.  He reported that he could get any reception on VHF\/UHF he could transmit and hear it on another device but he couldn&#8217;t receive.  <br \/><br \/>This led me to think perhaps he had the RF Gain\/SQL knob set wrong.  We meet up. It was demonstrated the rig was &#8220;deaf&#8221;.  I performed a factory reset, as the new guy said he had tried a bunch of internet suggestions to no avail.  <br \/><br \/>After the reset the radio still seemed deaf on FM VHF\/UHF.  The RF Gain\/Squelch knob had no effect on this.  I dug into the menus to find the RF Gain\/SQL setting and found this defaulted to RF Gain.  I looked at the available settings it was Squelch or RF Gain.  I am used to having a 3rd setting that makes 12 o&#8217;clock neutral and then turning to the left controls rf gain and turning to the right impacts the squelch.  Long story short, changing this setting to Squelch suddenly made the FM VHF\/UHF audio come to life.<br \/><br \/>I think helped the new ham learn how to program repeaters on this radio.  He is a technician class licensee that is planning to upgrade to general soon.  The radio came to him from a hamfest as a &#8220;starter shack&#8221; for an attractive price.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was recently contacted by a new ham that purchased an FT-897. He reported that he could get any reception on VHF\/UHF he could transmit and hear it on another device but he couldn&#8217;t receive. This led me to think perhaps he had the RF Gain\/SQL knob set wrong. We meet up. It was demonstrated [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elmering","category-station-operation","category-tx"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":199,"href":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions\/199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ka9kqh.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}