Radio Oddities

A post I’ll update as I find new things, but just to keep track of functionality in my radios that was unexpected. Initially had this in a Google Doc, but decided my Ham related stuff had a place here.

FT-2980R

  • Cannot delete a memory on the radio. You can only mask it, which has the effect of hiding it, but it doesn’t automatically become available as a free channel.

FT-8900

  • When in cross-repeat mode, any transmission turns on the cooling fan, which will not turn off until you power off the radio.
  • Has a similar “hidden but not deleted” feature to the FT-2980R, but if using PC programming software, you can actually delete them.

FTM-400XDR

  • To edit memories, you need to press the V/M button on screen for several seconds. However, if you reprogram the shortcut (the bottom 4 buttons) to remap V/M, you can no longer enter memory edit mode this way. It can’t be activated by selecting it after pressing the F key. You need to temporarily re-assign it to a shortcut key again.
  • You cannot change the frequency of a memory from the radio. You can delete it, but if it’s a repeater channel, you have to add it as a new channel, overwriting the old. You can change it via hooking it up to a PC. Given the other things you can do to memories (like add split frequencies), seems like a missed feature.
  • I haven’t reproduced this, but when trying initial setup, I somehow misconfigured something on the APRS side, and any attempt to transmit a beacon resulted in an “ERROR TX ERROR” popup. If I used the PTT button on the APRS frequency, it worked, and it transmitted on the A band just fine, it just wouldn’t manually, or automatically beacon. I fixed it by re-loading the configuration from my last saved SD card settings, and haven’t had it happen again. I do make sure I save a working configuration before fiddling with settings, just in case.
  • The Yaesu programming software is really poor. In particular, if you hook up the radio directly and try to upload, it often just has the “upload” item greyed out, and you simply cannot write the config. I’ve worked around this by using the SD card. Plug that into the PC, read and write to it, then put it into the radio, and read the new config.
  • When resetting the radio, or reading a new config, the radio sets the mode to AMS to decide if it’s doing Analog or Digital on a channel. There is no Fusion repeater in my area, and the radio gets confused by something on our local repeater, often switching into digital when I’m transmitting. Have to remember to hit D/x button to change to FM only mode when restarting the radio.

© 2020 Ken Wallich 

Published: 2020March05

Last update: 2022April15