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Reviews For: Yaesu FT-90r

Category: Transceivers: VHF/UHF+ Amateur Base/Mobile (non hand-held)

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Review Summary For : Yaesu FT-90r
Reviews: 138MSRP: 399.96
Description:
Micro 2m/440 transciever
Product is not in production
More Info: http://www.yaesu.com/ft90r.html
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
001383.5
KE6YOC Rating: 2003-12-15
Still ticking Time Owned: more than 12 months.
Update from my post 14 months ago. The rig has been in my truck for 6 months and works fine, before that I moved it around car to car to base. Bought the software for programming - the only way to go. Can reload/change frequencies in a jiffy. Was on close out for $229 last month. Good deal.

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Earlier 4-star review posted by KE6YOC on 2002-09-23

His rig is my "portable" - I use it car to car with a small larsen dual band mag mount, an old kenwood speaker that has a magnet base and a cig lighter plug. Makes a great scanner, has lots of memories. The mike has enough functions on it so I do not have to fiddle with the rig, which is way too small. It's been beat around and so far has held up well.
PA5LK Rating: 2003-12-15
good rig (after some mods) Time Owned: more than 12 months.
After doing a couple of mods it works great, very good rig for mobile use only the small RJ45 mike connector has got problems when stretching the mike cable a little bit extra.
N3TTN Rating: 2003-12-08
Nice rig, good price Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Got this rig back in Oct. from HRO for $229 on closeout. So far it has done evrything I have asked of it with no apparent problems. It does get mighty warm, especially on high power settings, but I mounted a small cooling fan on the back with sheet metal screws into the space between the cooling fins, and the rig runs cool as a cucumber now. If you like long winded conversations on high power, an external fan might be the way to go to avoid some of the heat related problems people are reporting. Overall, I am very satisfied with this radio.
N4LRA Rating: 2003-12-08
Great Minitaure Dual Band Transciever Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I've owned my FT90R for three years. This radio has provided me many hours of faultless mobile performance on both 2 meters and 70 centimeters.
I've not experienced any of the problems that some have posted here.

Heating: This rig does heat up during extended transmit at full power, but this is not a fault and the internal fan dissipates the heat properly. Heating has never adversly affected performance.

Inermodulation: I live in a heavily congested RF environment and at worst experienced mild intermod in the worst areas.

Solution: I added a PAR filter about two years ago and have never experienced intermod of any kind since.

Final Comments: Too bad Yeasu has decided to discontinue this realy fine radio.
WA8NNX Rating: 2003-11-16
Yaesu should refund money Time Owned: N.A.
I had two of these and both would lose recieve when the radio got hot. What is absurd is that Yaesu told me they had never heard of this problem. Guess they don't read this site. Yaesu should just admit that they made a bad radio and offer refunds or another type of replacement radio to the many people who got stuck with this junk. Dealers who are still selling these on closeout should warn the buyer but I'm sure they will never do that.


KE4RWS Rating: 2003-11-16
Junk, Pure Junk Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I've owned two FT-90's over the years and BOTH are complete junk. I'm surprised Yaesu would even make such a POS. The radio has a severe overheating problem, and the internal fan is absolutely WORTHLESS. Might as well not even include a fan because it isn't capable of moving any air throughout the radio, which is why it overheats so bad. The FT-90 is an abortion in terms of performance because the heat causes a sever handicap of this radio. If Yaesu was smart they would've never made this model, or at least cancelled it the first year they came out. Once the radio heats up you lose nearly all UHF receive ability. Then the audio starts cracking up due to the heat, and before you know it your sending it in to Yaesu. Do yourself a favor and buy something else!!

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Earlier 3-star review posted by KE4RWS on 2003-05-25

Many of the reviews here indicate the FT-90 has problems with even normal keydowns in terms of getting abnormally hot even under typical operating conditions. I too found this to be the case with the FT-90 I owned briefly. I tried this model out for a few months and was disappointed with the rigs inability to dissipate heat even somewhat reasonably. Even when using low-power the rig would have overheating "issues", which came in the form of poor UHF performance (poor receive, TX audio cutting out, etc.). This appears to be a common problem with this model given the size of the chassis. Apparently the built-in cooling fan doesn't move enough air through the chassis to make any difference. One has to wonder why Yaesu included a fan at all, except for the purposes of saying it has one. Aside from the overheating problem I found the FT-90 to perform reasonably well. That is, for general receive puroposes, it worked pretty good, And the heat problem wasn't just a high-power use issue. It happened using low-power as well. In fact, most of the time I used my FT-90 in the low-power setting. 90% of it's use was low-power UHF. And since I mainly use local repeaters I rarely needed to move the radio higher than the low-power setting. Even still, it had the same problem with heat that everyone else on these posts seem to have!

I ended up selling my FT-90 because I found no real use for it since it would overheat nearly every time I tried to have a simple conversation with someone. I originally purchased it off eBay from another amateur operator in Germany. My FT-90 was the European version, which had the "N" connector rather than an SO-239, plain non-DTMF mic, and unblocked 800 MHz coverage vs. our blocked cellular band (God forbid if we overhear someone ordering a pizza or something). Aside from that there were no other differences. I had no problem making my money back when I resold it on eBay. In fact, I made a little extra probably because it had unblocked 800 MHz coverage. Wowee . . .

The bottom line with the FT-90 seems to be that it's a decent dual band mobile rig but a bit too small to handle 50/35 watt transmissions effectively. And since the vast majority of those posting here seem to indicate a heat problem I tend to agree that it's not just an isolated problem, and it is in fact widespread.
AB0RE Rating: 2003-11-15
Heat Problems Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I *had* two FT-90Rs. When they suffered the heat/squelch problem, I got rid of them both. They were, however, nice when they were functioning correctly. I would've given the radio a "2" as it appears the problems can be fixed when sent to Yaesu, but I've noticed some people leaving multiple "5" reviews to try and boost the product's rating - must be Yaesu fanatics (i.e. kg4orx left 4 reviews). I just wish Yaesu would do something about their quality control as they'd have some incredible radios then.

73,
Dan / ab0re
N1SHF Rating: 2003-11-15
PROBLEMS 3 days old!! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Well for VHF, EXCELLENT, for size, and audio quality EXCELLENT......and then

3 days old and the RX on UHF is Junk! I can barely hear local 440 repeaters. I am very upset that a 3 day old radio has to go back to Yaesu, because HRO has no more to replace it with.

N1SHF
W7DCF Rating: 2003-10-24
Not quite there yet Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Based on recent reports, I assumed things were on the upswing with the FT90R and I expect that is mostly the case as far as heat problems. At the moment I'm on my second FT-90 in as many weeks and still have the same minor but bothersome problem. When scanning in the memory mode with the 5 second timed option, the radio will stop on the next memory channel
after it finds a busy channel even when the next channel is not busy. This seems to be confined to the 2 meter repeaters. This behaviour only occurs if the active channel that initally stopped the scan stays active beyond the 5 second pause. I had a friend's 3 year old FT-90 to compare with the current FT-90 and it did not have the problem. Not a major problem and one that some may not notice, but it's not what you would expect. These radios are fine if size is your prime concern, but I would expect that would be about the only motivation to have one.
AD5X Rating: 2003-10-13
Never had a problem Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I bought my FT-90r in October 2000 when I bought my new car (Volkswagon New Beetle). It has worked great all this time. The size and remote head capability made it perfect for my car.

Guess I'm luckier than some with Yaesu. I've had two FT-51Rs, an FT-50R, the FT-90R, two VX-2Rs, an FT-7, FT-990, an FT-1000MKV, and an FT-817. Only problem I've ever had with a Yaesu was the "blown finals" FT-817 problem.

Phil - AD5X