Chapter 7
By Michael Stevenson
Still owning the Sony 7600D, in 1989 I saw a local ad for a Yaesu FRG-7 or FROG 7 as they were nicknamed, it was cheap and I had read and heard a lot about this good old communications receiver so I decided to buy it and try out this legend to see how good or bad it really was.
It is quite a large heavy receiver in gunmetal grey with a black metal front mounted speaker grille and lots of dials and knobs including the large continuous main tuning knob. This is a time consuming and difficult receiver to tune (a bit like the old valve radios of the 20's and 30's) although it does not take much effort once you get used to it, there is an antenna peaking dial, a MHz dial and the main tuning dial which just bandspreads the MHz dial, what is annoying is that one must continuously twiddle the antenna peaking dial and MHz dial to keep the maximum sensitivity and if you are in a hurry then it can be fiddly!
Apart from that, this is a very sensitive old radio with the ability to resolve weak signals very nicely (in comparison to the Sony 7600D anyway), the only problem is, it also suffered from some images and overload on the odd occasion, I do not know if my FRG-7 required a tuneup or not, this all aside.
The major setback was a lack of a true narrow filter, it was virtually only a low audio tone setting which did not help much at all when trying to separate stations, not only that, it was not PLL synthesized with digital readout and the old analogue dial was a little inaccurate, there was also no direct frequency entry or memory presets, but, I can now say that I have experienced the legend in the Yaesu FRG-7 which also had reasonably stable SSB, but only reasonable!
I would have to say that this beaut old receiver was not too bad at all and is certainly one of the most sensitive radios I have used, unfortunately, it was not good enough for the yearning I still had to own a truly high performance REAL communications receiver, it was time to sell both the Sony and Yaesu and purchase my next radio which will be the subject of my next part in the receiver series.
Chapter 6| Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9A| Chapter 9B| Chapter 10| Chapter 11|
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