FT-70D

This was my first actual purchase in ham radio. I bought it alongside the Signal Stuff Signal Stick, and it was the radio I used to make my first contact on the K4TS repeater in Fredericksburg, VA!

It's a great little radio to talk on Yaesu System Fusion, especially over my Pi-Star.

Unfortunately, the built-in microphone isn't all that great; I have to be very mindful of where I put the HT to my face when I talk, and it's basically unreadable without pumping the mic gain all the way up.

Notes

I've had a bear of a time getting this radio working on APRS. The pinouts for the FT-70 are wholly incompatible with the BTECH APRS cables I use for APRS with my Explorer QRZ-1 and GD-88.

I've finally had a breakthrough, though. I grabbed a CT-44 cable from Amazon. It doesn't actually make the radio compatible with the Kenwood connector, though it should be a pretty straightforward process of building a wire that will bridge the right gaps.

I drew up a (very shaky) diagram of the internal wiring of the BTECH APRS cable, and am in the process of wiring up a sort of crossover cable to, hopefully, get it on the air!

I'll also need to build a PTT ciruit that triggers when Direwolf transmits. This is built in to Direwolf, but it requires a non-trivial amount of work to actually make the circuit.