Neat feature for 60m use of FT-817ND

Several of you may already know this, but as I’ve only just found it others may not yet know.

The FT-817ND (note ND model not straight 817), has 60m coverage as standard (at least in the US/Australian version) but… no actual band for it on the band change switch - however …
There is a floating extra “band” on HF that by default is set to 15MHz for WWV I guess. What is great is that this is a band that you can change to be the 5.3MHz/60m band very easily (no soldering iron required).
The way it works is this: Whenever you tune with the normal tuning knob to a frequency that is outside one of the existing Amateur bands, this “floating” band will remember it when you switch bands using the up/down buttons. What this means is that if you were listening to WWV on 15 MHz, you would then find that “band” between 20 and 17 meters again. If you were to tune to 60m (from 40 or 80m for example), that “band” would then be found between 40 and 80 meters. What if you need two additional bands - well both VFO-A and VFO-B have their own “floating” bands!

Given how tight 60m is on space this is a big improvment on trying to use set memories as I was doing!

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Hi Ed,

After ‘opening’ up my ancient FT-817 circa 2000/1? for 60M in the early days of 60, I set the then ‘F’ 60M channel allocations into memory. But then we only had channels so it made sense to store to memory. These still exist in my 817 plus the additional channels we were subsequently allocated.

Now with ‘bandlets’ it’s easy as you eluded to, to just drift off the memory into the relevant VFO to a specific frequency (I thinks that’s how you do it at the moment?).

Not sure if there is any great advantage coming off of 40M to then dial down to a 60M freq. But maybe I’m missing something - probably from the fact that I usually drive the 817 from memory channels!

73

Jack(;>J

Hi Jack,
Being based in Germany I have the WRC15 15KHz “band” and so having it tuneable like any other band is an improvment for me over the channel and tune approach - both will work, I simply find it easier to have this method.

In the case of the UK “bandlets” your approach may indeed be a safer option!

73 Ed.