Yaesu FTM-400DR Product Reviews

This entire radio is poorly thought out and engineered. It seems like Jun Hasegawa, sat everyone down in a board room and said, forget about actual usage, let’s just make this radio and fusion look good on paper. The biggest annoyance is that the screen is way too bright at night, even on its minimum setting. The touch screen is mostly useless and obviously an afterthought. The screen on this thing is like time traveling back to the 1980s. APRS is crippled, if Yaesu cannot do it right they should just leave it off. The STUPID camera mic, take 10 minutes out of our day to send some extremely low quality photo at a completely useless resolution. Then if someone keys up in analog you get to start all over.

System Fusion is a disaster! According to the repeater book there are 34 Fusion repeaters in my area. I have tested and only 2 of them are set up to work on Digital. There are 30-something more between Minneapolis MN and Omaha, NE and during a recent drive, there is only 1 that has digital enabled in Des Moines, IA. Digital and analog should not be fused. Now we have people linking analog/digital repeaters and the audio is mostly unintelligible horrible garbage. Wires X is the dumbest thing to ever hit ham radio. What a total mess! Now we are in this never ending “waiting on firmware” before it works on the repeaters. The firmware isn’t coming. Stop wasting time waiting for it! It’s like Yaesu is having a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE with their lame repeaters and dirt cheap prices on the FTM-400DR.