The wet string chronicles…

…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!

Dean Amateur Radio computers, DM780, FT-950, HRD, PSK31, RTTY, SB-2000, technology, Yaesu

The Yaesu FT-950 - detail

It’s here and it’s all hooked up and working. There are still a few things to check out but so far so good. The Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) software is installed and rig control is now working after some initial problems (of which more in a later post). MMTTY is configured and I’m QRV for RTTY. I’ve turned everything off now for the night but I’ll hope to try PSK31 tomorrow night and maybe get CW keying working for contest operating (I use CWType). Beyond that it’ll be getting to grips with the HRD software which is all new to me but widely used and respected so I’m keen to adopt it here.

The pictures really don’t do the FT-950 justice - in the flesh it’s bigger than I expected and it really has presence sat here on the desk. I have yet to get to grips with all of the radios many advanced features but early indications are that it’s a radio I’ll very much enjoy using. More to follow, but for now…it’s bedtime.

Dean Amateur Radio, Pictures FT-950, HRD, MMTTY, RTTY, Yaesu