The first few contacts…
…with the FT-950 are in the log but it wasn’t all plain sailing! Despite leaving it all in a working state when I powered off last night, turning it on this evening intent on meeting Richard (M0SNR) on 6m for a quick RTTY sked resulted very much in a ‘back to square one’ type scenario - nothing would work!
To cut a long story short the problem appears to have been 6m. Whenever the radio was set to transmit on 6m it would stay in transmit even if the PC software sent a PTT off command. HRD wouldn’t unkey the transmit, neither would MMTTY. Only unplugging the USB cable to the interfce box (the SB-2000) would force the radio back to receive mode.
I’m going to see what others on the HRD forums and the FT-950 Yahoo user group think about this but I suspect RFI on 6m getting the interface software or low level COM port driver into a bad state.
The good news was I made a few contacts tonight once I had figured out what the problem was. At 20:02 UTC I had a short PSK31 QSO using the Digipan software with HA1FB (Feri) and at 20:32 UTC I had a RTTY QSO with OH1LWZ (Hannu) using the MMTTY software. I do eventually hope to use DM780 for PSK31 but I will continue to use MMTTY for RTTY even though this does mean you have to close the HRD software because they both use the same COM port. Not ideal but I am prepared to put up with it for the sake of using MMTTY and FSK keying.
I have more work to do but the first thing I’ll check tomorrow is that tonights settings are still ok when I power it all back up again after shutting it down tonight!