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welcome to another video from lockdown electronics with may bill and this time we've got some 1980s nostalgia in the shape of a retro rig and that's none other than the asu ft 290 this is the mark ii version now 34 years ago um round about this time i was revising hard for my forthcoming radiometers exam and back then all those years ago there was only one way to get a radio license that was to take the city and guilds exams uh things are so much better these days and think it's probably harder now to get your license but uh there were certainly plenty of people i know who took the um last that took the exam passed it got a license and never really got themselves on the air because there was no there was no practical aspect at all and there was no um practice at operating and uh the license license conditions were such that um it was quite restrictive in terms of the messages that you could pass but i was absolutely mad keen i was determined to pass in fact i wanted to do a great deal better than pass which i'm pleased to say i did and then after that i went out and bought a radio and the radio i bought was this ft 290 not just any ft 290 this is the actual radio that i bought all those years ago and i think i paid just over 400 pounds for it at the time from a radio shop in the west midlands who would remain lameless because i think it sometimes courts a bit of controversy but um i think if you do the maths and allow for inflation these days that would have been that would be like spending about 1200 pounds on a radio now so i think for 200 pounds these days you can probably get um an ic 7300 which is a certainly got a lot more features than that so um let's start by having a look at um the history of the ft 290 and and why it became a classic back in the 80s well the year is 1981 and there were a couple of important technological events that occurred that year one of them was the first flight of the space shuttle and the other one was the introduction of the ft 290r by yaesu it's a vhf two meter multi-mode two and a half watts output fm single side band and cw um ideal for portable working not least because it was possible to fit batteries inside the case so it would actually operate as a self-contained unit it was a very popular radio actually and proved very popular indeed in fact there's still and you still find plenty on ebay even now um one of the reasons it was popular in 1981 the british government finally got around to permitting legalized cb up to that point cb...