开云体育

All,

I'd indicated in a repair/mod thread last week that I was going to design a mounting plate for an auxiliary cooling fan setup. After a lot of studying and contemplation this afternoon I decided to re-design the entire rear panel for mounting two additional 60mm computer fans over the PSU area. The original PA heat sink fan opening has been given a different look as well.

Original panel mounting hole locations were used. The new panel won't quite be "plug and play" owing to the fact that the holes for the fan screws and 4 of 6 plate mounting holes (center and rightmost two, looking at the rear of the radio) must be countersunk in order for things to fit nice and flush. Plan is to use M4 flat head screws for the fan mounts; these will be captively retained by thin M4 nuts and the fans will slide onto them. I managed to locate a gasket/spacer for a 60mm fan which should allow proper sealing and spacing over the captive nuts. I -may- get lucky and not have to countersink the 4 plate mounting screws with this arrangement but at least there are fall-back options.

This evening I sat down at the CAD terminal and whipped out a design, then played around with the various online laser cutters to see what kind of prices they'd charge. SendCutSend came in at around $20 for single-quantity 1/8" 6061-T6, with the next available lot size at 5pcs. You'll need to finish the panel after machining is complete; I'd recommend powder coating if you have a shop nearby. You'll also need to source slightly longer mounting screws for the plate.

If there's any interest in this effort, I'll upload the DXF to the Files area. I'll get a sample part cut then spec the rest of the hardware and post a list of sources along with an assembly guide.

73 - Fred, N8YX

If you can send a pic of the finished job I'm interested.?

I put a picture of my version of the mod in the files section a while back:?/g/Yaesu-FT-980/files/06%20-%20Mods/Adding%20a%20super-quiet%20always-on%20secondary%20cooling%20fan.pdf?I used an 80mm computer fan right in back of the original. The key was getting a "super silent" on, rated at only 26dBA at full power, while still? moving up to 32cfm.

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-Mat Breton, N8TW

Mat (and all),

I'm going to order the prototype plate (along with some motorcycle radio project pieces I need) in the next few weeks, then when I finish machine work on a couple of the parts I'll ship everything off to the powder coaters.

There is another plate I'm going to fabricate for this effort, and I may do a CAD pattern for that one too. If you look next to the AC connector on the back of the radio you'll see a punched (but taped) hole; the plan is to use this space to mount a plate that will hold a coaxial DC power jack and an RCA connector for feeding the 8.9875MHz IF out to a YO-901. Plan is to borrow the method Yaesu used with the FT-90x, as this area of the IF strip is identical in both designs.

The other mod I'm going to perform to these rigs is the cascade filter board installation (though I'm going to have to homebrew at least two of the boards). My test rig will be going back on the bench as soon as I finish restoring a couple of FT-902DMs and I'm going to see about decoding the mystery of the Aux Band PROM. FWIW, I did some testing of the Gen TX Mod and from 22MHz up it seems to provide power on par with the Ham VFO/BPF arrangement. For 60M use...no. There's got to be a better way to approach this addition with a '980, and I'll attempt to solve the puzzle.

73 - Fred, N8YX