Yaesu: Yaesu VX-8r Stubborn Time / Clock Battery? ⏰📻

[LittleMissMOSFET]

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/9c9821

I have tried every permutation of the various time settings I can, as elaborated in the link above. And yet my old Yaesu VX-8r APRS clock insists on setting to GMT+2. I can change the day of the week using the standard way - (v/m) on “SET”. But with either AUTO or MAN in the “gps time set” setting it will insist on the hour staying at GMT+2. The GPS unit draws and displays local time nicely. It will set the minutes on the system/APRS clock when set to AUTO, apprently. Not the hours. Timezone setting seems to help nothing.

I believe this to be because the RTC (clock) battery is long dead. (Usually looks like a tiny aspirin or coin.). I recall when MARS modding the thing that almost anything beyond the membrane is inaccessible by mortals. I had gingerly tried. Given the age, I’d rather not yank on any SMT ribbon cables and such.

Am I missing something aside from the possibly dead clock battery? Is there a sanity-preserving way of opening the VX-8r without a cleanroom which won’t brick the device? Thanks!

 

[AK9R]

There's a Time Offset (also called Time Zone) buried in the menus somewhere. It needs to set to your difference from UTC.

Assuming the GPS receiver is working properly, it will determine the time of day in UTC. You have to tell the radio your offset from UTC. If you are in the Eastern Time Zone, you are 5 hours behind UTC, so your offset is -5 hours. Note that the radio doesn't understand Daylight Savings Time, so you need to take that into account. Right now, Eastern Time is -4 hours from UTC.

Also note that if you set something in the menus, you have to tap the PTT button to "save" the settings and exit the menu.

 

[LittleMissMOSFET]

Thanks, but as noted above, the time zone setting does nothing for this APRS clock issue.