Yaesu FT-70 Battery Management

I swear, this place isn't going to turn into an FT-70 fanboy blog, but once I started scratching around some interesting things emerged.  Three videos:

1. charging cradle
2. charging times in cradle & direct plug-in
3. power-saving menu settings

TLDW summary:  Get the cradle.  Yeah yeah, it's $30 for a piece of plastic that should've come with the radio to begin with.  However, you can charge a battery alone without  having it in the radio with this, and with the cradle it charges 3x faster in a (mere!) 3 hours.  Also, get a spare battery.  Now for some menu settings (hoo boy); the first 5 are from the videos & comments, the rest are my bright ideas:

• 48 RX Save – 0.3 sec (up from 0.2)
• 10 BSY.LED – off
• 02 APO –  shut off automatically; maybe not all that useful, I'm not using it
• 14 DIMMER – dim display lamp, down from its default bright setting; I went from 6 to 2
• 59 firmware version – update it to 1.11 or higher to reduce parasitic drain when off
• 56 TOT – auto TX off; set to something like 1.5 minute, in case TX button gets inadvertently pressed
• 35 OPN.MSG – set to DC so you know batt voltage on power-up; 7.4v means it's getting pretty low.  It'll keep you aware of battery state when starting use.
• Pop the battery out when not in use to completely eliminate parasitic drain.

Combining these, one of the commentators on one of the above videos claimed to get his receive time up into the 16 to 18 hour range.  If you need more than that in an HT just get a spare battery, which you should've done already.  Plenty for a busy day on the trail.  Two more for scans:

• 52 SCN.RSM – HOLD at channel while someone's talking.  Why wouldn't you want to hear what's being said?
• 61 WX ALT – ON  Scan weather channels for alert tone when scanning.  BTW, it's the only way I've found to actually get over to the NOAA WX channels.  Smooth UI, Yaesu.  Real smooth.

Finally and as always:

• Use minimum TX power.  [F][PO] -> rotate knob between 0.5, 2, and 5w.

That's possibly the biggest power saver of all.  If 6 & 4 dB jumps (10 dB total) to the full 5w don't get it for you, you probably need a bigger radio.