At some point in 2020 a fellow ham gave me a Yaesu FT-2700RH that he had. I gave it a once over, replaced the memory battery, and tested it attached to a dummy load. The unit works perfectly!

Since I do not have a microphone for it, I have made a harness to connect it to the NucleoTNC that I built and have used it both with APRS and packet on VHF with great success! Very solid unit even if it looks a bit ugly and is missing a few teeth.

Since the NucleoTNC doesn’t seem to be decoding 100%, I decided to simply use this as a receive-only APRS iGate for usage in the field paired with a Raspberry Pi running Direwolf and a 3G modem. I tried it during the 2025 Ride the Ridges event and other than the mishap due to the box where the unit was housed becoming too hot and shutting down the Raspberry Pi and the 3G modem.

This poor radio even though it looks beaten up and ugly refuses to die and just keeps working so I am bringing it back as a full portable iGate + digipeater for APRS for local events.