Hot Stuff

I had a chance to play around a bit with a new Yaesu FTX-1 rig during Field Day this year. One of our club members brought his and we hooked it up to an end-fed antenna just to monitor. Here's a few quick observations.

• Audio is excellent. Yaesu really did a neat trick with the 'front firing' speakers, which really are not front firing, but downward firing, but into a resonance chamber below the radio that directs the audio forward. I found the audio was loud, clear and distortion free. Good job there, Yaesu
• The screen is very good - clear, crisp and bright, and well laid out
• The configuration soft menu system appears to follow the FT-710 layout, which I thought was pretty good
• The main VFO knob is too big - it gobbles up too much front panel real estate, space that could have been put to use for other purposes like a dedicated sub-VFO knob
• The whole Field package seemed very sturdy. As many have commented, it's not light - it's very brick-like

But...

The radio was running just on receive, and it was running hot. I mean, HOT. There's a specific point on the back of the radio just above where I think the PA board is located, and for some reason it was hot to the touch. The radio was on receive only because we didn't want to interfere with Field Day stations operating just a few yards away. I was astonished at how hot this thing was running. Compared to its #1 competitor, the IC-705, well, there is no comparison. Both operate at the same power levels (10 watts max), but even running heavy digital modes like JS8CALL the 705 never gets above moderately warm (less than half of the built-in heat indicator scale, and never near the danger level). One YouTuber reports that his FTX-1 gets up to 110 degrees F. when running FT8. Of course, Yaesu has always stated that the optional fan is necessary when running digital modes, and I don't really have an issue with that, but they should include the fan as a standard item with every radio sold.  

Heat management is an issue all radio manufacturers face. Some do it better than others, but more often manufacturers get it right with some models, wrong with others. Even Icom. The IC-705 and the IC-7300 are well known as 'cool-runners', but their higher end commercial HF rig, the F-8101, is infamous for its heat issues and the need to run its noisy clip-on cooling fan even when just working SSB. Elecraft's small KX3 and KX2 field radios are notorious hot runners on digital modes, which has spawned an active accessory market for heat sinks and clip-on fans.

Nobody I know of has yet to open up an FTX-1 to take a look at how the PA board is built, and what components Yaesu spec'd. It may be that the engineers knew heat would be an issue, and they over-built that part of the radio to handle the heat. Equally likely, we may see that Yaesu ends up replacing a lot of boards under warranty because they just couldn't handle the heat. Either way, we'll know in about a year. Stay tuned.

W8BYH out