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FTX-1 USB Setup

RigPlane drives the Yaesu FTX-1 over its USB jack with the yaesu-cat backend, which speaks Yaesu's text CAT protocol.

What You Need

  • A USB cable with a type-C plug for the radio. The FTX-1 has a built-in USB to dual-UART bridge, so no interface box is needed.
  • On a PC, the Virtual COM port driver: Yaesu's CAT manual says to install it from the Yaesu website before connecting.
  • RigPlane itself: see Installation.

Serial Ports and CAT Rate

Over USB the FTX-1 shows two serial ports:

Port Name in the CAT manual Use
Enhanced COM Port CAT-1 CAT commands (frequency, mode and the rest). Use this port with RigPlane.
Standard COM Port CAT-2 TX control (PTT, CW keying, digital modes) or CAT

CAT-1 runs at 38400 bps from the factory (OPERATION SETTING → GENERAL → CAT-1 RATE: 4800, 9600, 19200, 38400 or 115200 bps). The yaesu-cat backend also defaults to 38400; if you change CAT-1 RATE, pass the same rate with --serial-baud. Each of the five presets in the PRESET menu has its own CAT-1 RATE as well.

To find the port, run:

rigplane discover --serial-only

It lists the port where the FTX-1 answered.

Radio Settings for USB Audio

When no audio device is named, RigPlane first looks for the audio device on the same USB connection as the serial port, then falls back to picking one by name. To choose devices yourself, pass --rx-device and --tx-device with names from rigplane --list-audio-devices.

To transmit audio from the computer (Web UI voice or digital modes), set MOD SOURCE to USB in the RADIO SETTING menu for each mode group you transmit in: MODE SSB, MODE AM, MODE FM and MODE DATA each have one, with the choices MIC, USB, Bluetooth and AUTO. Each preset in the PRESET menu has its own MOD SOURCE, with the choices MIC, USB, REAR (the RTTY/DATA jack) and AUTO.

CLI

Name the backend: without --backend yaesu-cat, --serial-port selects the Icom serial backend.

# Status
rigplane --backend yaesu-cat --serial-port /dev/cu.usbserial-XXXX status

# Set frequency and mode
rigplane --backend yaesu-cat --serial-port /dev/cu.usbserial-XXXX freq 14.074m
rigplane --backend yaesu-cat --serial-port /dev/cu.usbserial-XXXX mode USB

Web UI

rigplane --backend yaesu-cat --serial-port /dev/cu.usbserial-XXXX web
# Then open http://localhost:8080

RigPlane has no hardware spectrum scope for the FTX-1. The Web UI draws its panadapter from the received audio instead.

Python

import asyncio
from rigplane import create_radio, YaesuCatBackendConfig

async def main():
    config = YaesuCatBackendConfig(device="/dev/cu.usbserial-XXXX")
    async with create_radio(config) as radio:
        freq = await radio.get_freq()
        mode, _ = await radio.get_mode()
        print(f"{freq/1e6:.3f} MHz  {mode}")

asyncio.run(main())

YaesuCatBackendConfig also takes baudrate (default 38400), rx_device, tx_device and audio_sample_rate.

Two Receivers

The FTX-1 profile has two receivers that share one VFO (VFO scheme ab_shared). Some controls exist for MAIN only; see the FTX-1 items in the beta known limitations.

See Also