Retro Receiver - Yaesu FR101S

[VK3BVW]

Craig Seager VK2HBT has contributed another excellent Retro Receiver Review - #8 - the Yaesu FR101S. Worth a read!

http://medxr.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/retro-receiver-review-8-yaesu-fr101s.html

[BoomboxDX]

Cool looking Yaesu. Looks like a digital FRG-7 on steroids.

[Looking-Glass]

Brought back some memories that read did.  I bought a full FT-101E series station back in the late 70's from Greg Whiter down in Mitcham, Victoria.  This set up retired my FT-200 series HF station.

FT-101E, FL-2100B, YC-601B, FV-101, SP-101, FRG-7, YD-101 and an FT-220 2m base station too.  

Served me well for many years before I upgraded to FT-901DM (nice radio, drifted a bit), then FT-ONE (utter junk box, full of dry joints and rusted out after stint in tropics) and followed with an FT-980 (beautiful radio & exceptional on CW) and last FT-1000D (best Yaesu ever owned before receiver died this year!) before switching to Icom and Kenwood.

As mentioned in the article on the FR-101 the YC-601B external digital display also came with two different colour read outs.  The earlier ones were green and the later (and last) were red. This may apply in the case of the FR-101 series.

Jack VK2XQ

[VK3BVW]

Brought back some memories that read did.  I bought a full FT-101E series station back in the late 70's from Greg Whiter down in Mitcham, Victoria.  This set up retired my FT-200 series HF station.

In the 70s, we lived about 10 min away from Greg's store. He ran a good operation there, before changing direction and getting into military stuff (he knew where the money REALLY was!!).    You've had many Yaesu rigs over the years. A nice collection over that time.

[Looking-Glass]

The years up until the mid to late 1990's was the era of good communications receivers. sadly this has now passed, I think the advent of general coverage receive in all the HF transceiver killed off the exclusive comms receiver.

I had a Realistic/Radio Shack DX-160 given to me in the early 80's and fiddled around with it, then I had a Drake SSR-1 which was quite nice but basic.  The FRG-7 was a good receiver which I bought new in the late 70's and then upgraded to a FRG-7700 with the external plug in VHF transverters, which worked, but lacking.  The FRG-7700 was exceptionally good for MW and Long Wave (NDB) DXing, had some good results from that set down there.

Best receiver I owned was an Eddystone analogue but silly me, I gave it away, they are collectors items now and worth a tidy sum.

The FR-101 receiver never really took the market by the gollies in Australia, and perhaps Japan, as they never hung around all that long. 

Best all rounders were the JRC NRD series receivers, been looking for a NRD-545 secondhand for a long time but no luck.  There was no doubting we were really spoilt for radio gear from the 70's to 90's.