For the first time in several years, I was able to go the the 2023 Dayton Hamvention. If you have ever been, it is perhaps the best hamfest there is. If you did go to the Hamvention, did you get your Yaesu hat? I did – as well as my daughter, KC8GRS, and her two kids. It was a great 3 day event with approximately 35,000 hams present. One of my goals was to purchase a Yaesu FT5DR radio.
Bought the FT5DR
So I wanted to pick up a digital radio that supported Yaesu’s System Fusion. After chatting to one of the guys at the Yaesu booth I went straight over to the Ham Radio Outlet booth and bought the Yaesu FT5DR handheld radio. I also bought the RT systems USB-68 cable, but not the software since I don’t really have a Windows computer, except for an old laptop that does dual boot into Windows 7, but I almost always boot into Ubuntu. Since most of my computers are now Linux based, so the software that they provide won’t work anyway. Instead I use the Chirp program for my radios.
CT68 cable not working
After I got home and started looking at my shiny new Yaesu FT5DR, I quickly found out, that Chirp can’t see the CT68 cable! So the first thing I did was open up a terminal window, and issued lsusb to see if Ubuntu can see the device. Sure enough, as you can see in the screenshot below, its there!
But when I type ls /dev/ttyUSB* it doesn’t show as being available as shown below:
My first thought was that I had a defective CT68 cable. But then I remembered that I had my old linux laptop with Windows 7. I was able to put an old version of Chirp on it on the Windows 7 side, and sure enough I was able to program my FT5DR radio. But the old version wouldn’t let me program the radio for digital modes.
Mike, this was a great compilation. It got me out of the ditch trying to program a new FT5DR on a new computer with latest Linux MINT 21.2 Victoria built on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy. I did discover a few more things along the way which you might consider adding to your excellent set of instructions.
1) When the RT USB-68 cable was first plugged in, it was detected using “lsusb” but no ttyUSB* VCD as you mention. Check.
2) Adding the file “/etc/udev/rules.d/99-ftdi.rules” fixed problem 1) and creates a ttyUSB0 device. It did take a couple attempts due to making a typo and missing a ” … Check.
3) Now tried to use CHIRP (from the MINT repository) to download from the radio but it would time out with a communications error.
4) To check that the driver was working I used gtkterm to connect to /dev/ttyUSB0. It wouldn’t connect unless I was root. Solution was to add “dialout” to my groups.
> sudo gpasswd –add username dialout
5) CHIRP (the version in the MINT repository) now starts downloading data from the radio rather than just hanging. But, at the very end, spits out an error “module ‘collections’ has no attribute ‘Callable’. Not knowing what this actually means, I downloaded the latest version of CHIRP next-20231217 and now the radio can be downloaded.
Anyway, just wanted to add in the “gotchas” that I ran into, to save someone else trying to figure it out.
Thanks again for documenting this Mike!
Darrell — AF5FX
Glad it all worked out for you Darrell. Yes, I too was using the latest version of Chirp next. For me,upgrading to the latest version was the first thing I did when I ran into troubles thinking that since the FT5DR was a new radio, it just wasn’t in the list. Well it still wasn’t in the list so I had to go down the rabbit hole to figure it out.
Thanks for your input – enjoy your FT5DRi Its a great radio.
— Mike WB8ERJ
Mike, Darrel,
Thank you for documenting! I followed along, but I am not seeing the /dev/ttyUSB0 appear.
Using dmesg I see I am getting this error: “MMU error from client L2T (0) at 0x5001000, pte invalid”
Do you have any suggestions?
Raspberry pi 400 (the one with the white keyboard)
Best Regards,
Mark – KC1JZH
73
OK, Mark here again.
Beyond the error msg I posted before (I don’t see my comment about that posted yet) I have been poking around some more, and I have the following to report and ask:
1. upon running “udevadm control –-reload” the file “/sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/ftdi_sio/new_id” remains empty, but file size is unchanged at 4096 bytes
2. after plugging in the ct68 cable, lsusb shows the RT Systems cable as usual, dmesg shows something happening, as before, but file “/sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/ftdi_sio/new_id” remains empty still (using “sudo cat /sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/ftdi_sio/new_id”), but still file size 4096.
As before, do you have any suggestions?
Best Regards,
Mark – KC1JZH
73
Hello,
Sorry for not getting back to you. For some reason I’m not getting an email notification when a comment is posted.
Unfortunately I don’t know what is going on. KM4ACK posted a video based on this blog post. He wrote a script that does all this automatically.
Here is a link to his video. Hopefully this will get you going.
https://youtu.be/N40yRdFBr-E?si=BayVpYXeYi_RxOM4
— Mike