I just finished repairing and testing an Icom IC-V8000 mobile transceiver for fellow ham KI4KUT.
With the head/control unit with it removed from the radio, the speaker can be seen at the right-hand side.
The speaker had blown in the rig. This is the first time I’ve seen one of these blow a speaker, and they are pretty hard to come by. There was not one available in the United States, so I wound up having to order it from China and wait a month for it to get here. With the speaker replaced and the rig tested, it’s now ready to be put back into service.
Closeup view of the blown blown speaker before removal.
The front panel control board has to be removed in order to get the factory speaker out of the unit due to clearance issues and the fact they used some sort of epoxy to hold the original speaker in, which has to be painstakingly scraped out of a circular groove in order to get the thing out.
These are high power, 8 Ohm speakers. It also has a very low profile magnet, which prevents simply using an off-the-shelf speaker for replacement. While there are 3W/8 Ohm speakers available from vendors in the U.S., the magnets on those are too deep, which would make it impossible to get the head/control assembly back on the radio.