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The Yaesu FT-897/FT-857 ham radios come factory tuned for better performance. This is not uncommon, most radio manufacturers do this. The electrical components have tolerances, meaning that the sum of the parts is different from one radio to the next. This calibration data is radio specific to cause the output to be more or less uniform across their entire model line.

My recommendation is to back up those settings, since I am lazy I did not want to write them down and hope that I could read my writing at a later date, so I wrote a little tool that will let you back them up in a way that is easy to print out and keep with the manual or taped to the radio itself, or whatever you choose to do.  This would let you easily restore them if you ever need to.

If you do a hard reset or factory reset you will lose this data and it will return to the defaults.  This may be required if you have hosed the eeprom, did something strange to the radio and corrupted it, or pressed the magic button combination and did not fully understand what you were doing.

Enough banter, first download ft897calibration.pl.  Then execute it with the following options (if you do not specify any options it will print out help):

for linux
ft897calibration.pl -s 38400 -d /dev/ttyS0

for windows
ft897calibration.pl -s 38400 -d COM1

Now you should see the options print out in 2 columns, with the values that would be displayed if you go into the menu.

Troubleshooting

• Ensure that the radio is connected to your computers serial port and powered on.
• Ensure that you have perl installed and working properly.
• Ensure that you specified the correct baud rate (Menu 19)
• Ensure that the radio is set to use CAT and not a Tuner/Linear (Menu 20)