Every Geek should have one!
The Yaesu FT-707 Tuning Knob
February 7th, 2026.
When I first discovered Amateur Radio, I craved to have a Yaesu HS SSB Transceiver FT-707. Sadly, it was well out of my price range.
What was the draw?
Oddly it was the tuning knob.
The tuning was smooth as silk and a dream. It was all down to the design of the knob. It was easy to grip. The indentations around the edge are there to ensure a firm hold. The dimple is there to ease fine tuning. It was weighted; it had momentum. You could spin it and tune from one end of the band to the other in one go.
It was a master class in ergonomic design.
I've tried to reproduce the knob using my 3d printer. My chosen design software for this is OpenSCAD. The design is expressed in code, and I find this easier than point and click design tools. It took a few iterations, but the result is quite pleasing. It’s dimensionally as close as I can get to the original and in the rear of the knob there is space to hold lead weights. In this case old lead weights from piano keys but fishing weights, or similar, would be fine too. The lead is encased in epoxy resin. There is also a recess for a grub screw to secure the knob to an encoder shaft.
See: here for more details and the source code.
Bridging the gap. NMEA 0183 to NMEA 2000.
January 13th, 2026.
NMEA 0183 first surfaced in the early 1980’s. It encompasses an electrical specification and data specification and is extensively used to share data between marine electronics. It became the standard and was seen on all vessel sizes from small yachts to the largest super tankers. Though popular it had issues. Primarily speed, it utilised serial data at 4800 baud. Also, if many sensors were feeding data to single devices or multiple devices then multiplexors and repeaters often had to be used.
NMEA 2000 was released in 2001 and aimed to provide a simplified, high speed, multidevice network based on the automotive CAN bus. Simplified as it manifests as a single network cable with devices attached via simple drop cables. Faster as data flows at 250 kilobits per second, considerably faster than the 4.8 kilobits per second supported by NMEA 0138.
The big difference between NMEA 0183 and NMEA 2000 is the format of the data. NMEA 0183 passes human readable text that can easily be visually inspected and interpreted. NMEA 2000 passed proprietary binary data packets, with some messages being spread across multiple packets.
From the amateur yachtsman point of view NMEA 2000 raised the bar considerably. With NMEA 0183 they may have been tempted to write their own code, or even build their own devices, to interpret or generate data, that flows around their boat. With NMEA 2000 more complicated hardware is required and, on top of that, a clear understanding of the proprietary protocol being used.
Fortunately, a few dedicated people have taken time to decode the NMEA 2000 protocol and, looking around the internet, you can now find code libraries and examples of how to interface to the NMEA 2000 network.
So, what is required? My go to hardware would be an ESP32 on which to run the code, and a SN65HVD230 CAN Bus Transceiver Communication module to interface to the network. These are cheap components; the biggest expense will probably be the network T junctions and drop cables. My go to software would be that written by Timo Lappalainen, his software can easily be found on GitHub. With this combination I have seen the most novice of developers reading data from their yacht network.
Why can this be useful? Most amateur sailors run their yachts on a tight budget and may be in a position of transitioning from the old NMEA 0183 devices to NMEA 2000 devices. Commercial kit is available to connect NMEA 0183 devices to an NMEA 2000 network, but they tend to be expensive. This may lead to some older NMEA 0183 devices being made redundant. Perhaps the adventurous sailor would be tempted to build their own.
One example that I have recently worked on involved an old Silicon Marine exhaust temperature sensor. It was an NMEA 0183 device that wrote out simple NMEA 0183 MTW water temperature sentences through a serial port. The project required that this data be read and published to an NMEA 2000 network to be displayed on a Raymarine data display. Using the hardware and software mentioned above the result proved to be very satisfying. Not only did the water temperature get correctly published but it was also able to raise temperature alarms should the exhaust water temperature exceed a configurable temperature.