JS8Call with Yaesu FT-710

Pretty much all of my amateur radio operation up to now has been /portable with some /mobile operation using my portable radio setup. Over the past few months I have been mostly operating from my Mazda Bongo – its comfortable and warm and the rear 6 seats can be configured in various ways including a table area with the middle row and a decent size seat at the rear.

I added a few Mag Mounts to use with various antennas until I find a suitable roof rack t mount them on. One antenna I have had for a while is the Yaesu ATAS120, not had much use in the past but now I have a vehicle which is dedicated to my Amateur Radio and Camping Hobbies I found myself using it more along with my FT-991a.

Now, the FT-991a is a very good radio but its showing its age somewhat when compared to my Icom IC705 and I have been waiting patiently for and upgrade. Being a nearly 100% portable operator I do prefer a radio that covers HF and VHF but as there are still no new ‘shack-in-a-box’ radios I decided to pull the trigger on a new HF radio, the FT-710 seems to be the latest so I ordered one of those. Placed my Order on a Wednesday Lunchtime from LAMCO and it arrived Thursday afternoon despite the snow.

I was never too happy with the menu structure on Yaesu Radios, the FT-891 was quite difficult to navigate and the FT-991a was a slight improvement but still not great. The new FT-710 is much better, but Im still not too familiar with it so won’t say at this stage what I think if it.

I had spent a few hours using the radio in the back of the ‘Bongo on SSB with great results on 20m to 10m with the ATAS120 – one of my favourite antennas because of the excellent frequency coverage and it seems to work very well despite it’s size. I was able to make contacts from a few miles away to some DX across the Atlantic into the US and in the other direction all across Europe.

So it was time to connect the laptop to it and try some JS8Call.

Setting Up

Find a suitable USB A to B lead and plug it in with a computer and radio on each end. Scratch head for a few minutes while you try and find the FT-710 in the settings (nether FLRIG or HamRadioDeluxe have it listed at the time off writing) then pick there next ‘newest’ Yaesu radio option – FTDX10 – select the Correct COM port and give it a try.

That was it, other than selecting ‘DATA-U’ as the mode and touching ‘Preset’ it was all working right out of the box, no fiddly menu to read through and try and find the settings needed to change.

For info: in the FLRIG Settings I left all at default other than Radio and Com Port and baud rate set to 38400.

Rig: FTdx10

COM5 (yours may be different)

Baud 38,400

Select FLRIG in JS8Call as the radio and the USB options in the sound settings.

Within a few seconds of sending a couple of Heartbeat to test the setup I had a station sending me a message – Tom KC1GTU – I had not got as far as syncing my clock so I was off by about 2.5 seconds but Tom must have used the JS8Call time drift options to decode my signal.

A pretty good proof that it was all working, this was the FT710 set at 15W into the ATAS120 all powered by my 20ah LiFePo4 battery.

I will be using this setup a lot this year especially until the weather warms up a bit. I will take it with me for the charity Camping trip in March that I am doing, the campsite is already books so I will definitely not be doing it in the garden this year 🙂

I will attempt to update this site a bit more often in future 🙂

73

Mark, M0IAX

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