FT-911 low-audio repair

My Brother recently took his old FT-911 23cm handie talkie out of storage and powered it up. The radio worked, but the output audio was very low.

Tracing the audio path, I found sufficient audio at the output of the LM386 audio amplifier and the only component between the speaker and that was an electrolytic capacitor.

Naturally, that capacitor was buried deep in the circuit boards under lots of RF shielding. After some work, I was able to liberate the circuit board assembly from the transmit side. I couldn’t find a 100uF/10v capacitor – I only had a much larger 100uF/25V cap. It fit rather snugly but should do the job.

Once replaced, the radio now has sufficient audio. The output audio is not perfect in that there are some strange audio artifacts that can be heard from time time, but the radio works now.


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