Yaesu VX-6R Receive Fix
Some time in the last year my VX-6R radio started having problems receiving. On narrowband FM mode it had trouble picking anything up at all. The local weather radio station, which came in loud and clear on another radio, could barely be heard. I did some searching around and found this forum thread which described exactly the same problem. Then, while looking for the replacement part mentioned there, I found a description of the same fix here.
Conveniently, the second page above was written by Tim (WO9U), who is part of the amateur radio club at my school. I asked him about it and found out that he even had a spare of the replacement part! So today I opened up the radio and took care of it. The details are better explained in the links above, but basically it came down to replacing a filter that had failed. Tim was kind enough to not only provide the replacement part, but to bring his soldering equipment for me to use and to help with the actual repair. Having someone experienced watching certainly helped with the nervousness of taking a soldering iron to a relatively expensive radio!
The only difficult part was removing the old filter, which took almost an hour. It should have been easier, but the soldering iron used was not meant for lead free solder and probably was not as hot as would be ideal for this.
The replacement seems to have completely fixed the problem! Full signal strength on the weather radio station again and background noise is back to a normal level.