E1423: EASY! FT8 and Digital Modes with the DigiRig DR-891!

sign up today and thank you for the support. Cqcqpoda SIQ parks on the air from Keilocharlie five Hotel Whiskey Bravo. Today we're doing FT eight with the brand new DR eight ninety one cables from Digirig. I'll put a link in the description below. It basically makes your yazoo FT eight ninety one a plug and play radio for digital modes. I wanted to show you this today, so let's go.

Today's video is sponsored by ham Radio Prep. Save a twenty percent discount on everything that they offer all courses with the coupon code of Jason twenty. If you want to learn how to Ham radio, if you want to learn how to HF M Radio Prep is an excellent resource for that. Thank them if you contact them, thank them for sponsoring this channel. All right, while I'm working this right here, I'm able to record a video and

work FT eight at the same time. I just worked one QSO at a time, and then it pops up and it has me acknowledged the QSO into the logbook, and then I move on with the enable transmit button. I'm calling back to this guy right now, Kilo seven Papa Delta Whiskey, and I'm sending him Roger, Roger, Roger, but he's stopped replying to me. So that is how it is. So you got to go through some settings in the FT eight ninety one to get it set for digital modes. But I wanted to show you this setup.

This is the bag from the Tech Prepper. Unfortunately you cannot buy these bags anymore. I'm always on the lookout for other bags that will hold radios in Armlock cages. This is the TPA eight ninety one cage from Armlock. You can see how far it comes off of the radio right here. These guys were in the Huntsville Hamfest just a short time ago at the time of this recording. But I've had that cage for about a year. I took this entire setup before I put the digirig cables

on it. I took this entire setup to Utah, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Yellowstone National Park, several other places did some a lot of activations with this. But this is your digi rig eight nine DR eight ninety one set up here. It's the radio interface cable and the USB B cable that go into the back. Both of these cables have built in Faireite beads right there and again right here, so both of them have double Fairiite beads built into the cable.

Very cool setup from Dennis there. And then they go into the top of that digirig that you see right there, but they go into to the back of the digirig and then out of the front of the digirig is a single USB C cable. So the USBC comes out of here and it goes into your computer however you want to interface. You want to interface USBC to USBC, that's fine. This is my FCG one tough pad from Panasonic. It has a single USBA port on the side, so

I'm not I'm going c to a today. So now anytime I want to operate a digital mode from this radio all I have to do is plug in a single USB cable and we're done Windows. Now. I have found there's several videos on YouTube with this new DR eight ninety one cable system. There's a couple of guys doing win Link with it. There's a couple of guys using a Mac computer at Kdemord. He uses a Mac computer, gas Stone the tech Pripper. He's doing this with win

link and JSA call. I have yet to see anyone use this new system with a Windows box to do FT eight for PODA, So I wanted to show you that today. There are several settings in the radio you have to set. You have to go into like I don't know eight or ten or maybe twelve different menus. So I'm going to show you that here in a second. And then when I set it up the first time, WSJCX was acting weird. It was acting like I had had had the bandwidth set to a narrow bandwidth and

set it for three Killerhurtz wide. It was acting like it wasn't decoding signals, and it was acting like a couple of things. I closed WSJTX and restarted it and it fixed my problem. And I've had to do that a couple of times in the past. Not a big deal. Just sometimes if you change some settings, that's the thing. But that's just kind of the way it is. So if you're having trouble with WSJTX and you know you've got all your settings correct, close the program restarted. It

is a Windows box after all. Okay, I'm going to go over some of the settings with you that I changed in the FT eight ninety one in order to make it ready to do digital modes. Now, these settings can kind of vary, and you have to do a couple of things in Windows also, and quite frankly, you know, I'm pretty well versed in Windows and I got it

to work and it was no problem. But I emailed Dennis and then I ended up calling him on the phone, Dennis the owner of digirig, and he's like, well, there's actually a better way to do that, and we walked through some settings on the sound card and we got it to work a little bit better. So what I

did worked, but what he did worked better. So basically, you have to go in if you click on your once you have the digit rig plugged into USB, go down to the bottom right corner of your sistre the bottom right corner your window and Windows right click on your sound speaker and choose sounds. Then from there you have a recording and a playback tab. And on each of those tabs you might have multiple options in there, but you need to go down and find the one.

For the digi rig. Mine was listed as speaker and microphone USB audio codec. So what you can do is you can write or double click on those and change some settings in there. I renamed mine to digirig for both the playback and the recording device. The recording device is obviously the microphone, the playback is the speakers. But if you name both of them to digirig and make sure they're not set to the default speaker and microphone, that was something that did that. Dennis told me that

was important to do. Do not let them be become the default because Windows will mess with you because Windows is dumb. Find your ambient, find your default speaker and microphone from Windows, right click on it, set to default, make sure it's not the digi rig, and then from there you can go into the digi rig. You can uncheck a box that says AGC that's actually in Windows. You can set the audio levels and you can rename

them to what you want to. So that was a that was an extra I had it working before I did all that, but that was an extra step that helped me along as well. So there's a few menus in the FT eight ninety one that we have to set in order to do digital modes correctly, or at

least correctly with the digirig device. So what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to hold long press the F menu on the bottom of the radio, bottom left corner of the radio, and that'll take you into the deep menu for the FT eight ninety one. In the deep menu, you want to start at menu five to ish oh six, okay, and you want to set that for thirty eighty four hundred, which is the setting that we will match in the WSJTX software.

The cat TOT menu five oh seven is one hundred milliseconds and the cat rts is disabled, So which is a menu five DASHOA Those you want to set first off, and then you scroll down by using this wheel on the bottom left this control knob on the bottom left corner of the radio, and you're gonna find Menu eight

dash one, and it's for data mode. There's shovel options in there, and the setting that I'm using is others, and then the next three for PSK tone, other DSP and other shift are all set to fifteen hundred hertz. I found that on another video somewhere. I set that and it seemed to work, so I just kind of kept going with it. Eight h five Data cutoff, data L cut frequency is off data L cut slope. This

is eighteen dB slash oct. That's what it was by fault, so you could see the screen kind of flashing there anyway it was. It was that by fault, so I just left that. Data high cut frequency is also off so that it doesn't cut off the frequency at the top or the bottom of the WSJTX band. And then the high cut slope was also by default, so you can see that there. And then we want to in menu eighth nine. Data in select is rear because we're using that rear USB B port in the back of

the eight ninety one. This next menu is eight ten, which is data PTT select and da ky is what you want. Mine was there by default, so I didn't change anything. That's just kind of where it was and then data out level is fifty again that was mine by default. I did not change that. And then data VFO should be set to USB. I think mine was

something else. Mine was LSB. But this sets your data BFO to upper sideband because all digital modes on all bands are done on upper sideband, digital U or whatever your radio might call it. But that puts it on upper sideband. Then we're gonna scroll down here to menu eleven O seven, which is right here, which is BPO or b I'm sorry, BFO, and that should be set to auto. And then that's pretty much it for that

deep menu right there. If you long press the band button here on the top, it takes you to the mode. So you're gonna want to set that from SSB to data mode or from CW today you want to set it to data mode wherever you were beforehand, So you're gonna want to set that, and then on the width, which you can. I've got my width set right there.

That is five hundred by default, or it was before I changed it, okay, And to get into that menu, you just go into function short press the function menu, go into function one and you've got the width right there. You can choose which option is there turning the knob, press the knob, change the width right there. I set it on my quick menu down here, just because I wanted to. And the very last option is actually back in the deep menu. Again. Let's get out of there.

Let's go back into the deep menu and we're gonna scroll down to option sixteen oh three, which is the HF power. Now you can see right there on the screen. SSB power is one hundred HFAM powers twenty five and HF power I have set to thirty. And the reason I have it set to thirty is because this poda able antenna HF power is the data or the digital power for the data mode. When we changed it in the band selection long press, the band changed it to data.

This is the HF power that's used for that. Jesu's got different power settings for sideband AM and data. Some people don't like that. I think it kind of makes sense because you don't know what You may not always want to do one hundred wats or five watts on everything, but whatever, whether you like that or not, that's where you change that. This poda able antenna max is at

thirty five watts for digital modes. I ranted at thirty five watts for about a half hour and it got hot, so the SWR came up, so I changed it down to thirty watts and it seemed to work just fine. I was getting plenty of stations, I was hearing plenty of stations, I was getting responses from plenty of stations. With thirty watts, it worked just great. But that's pretty much all you have to set as far as the radio menus go, and once you have all that, it

should automatically connect up. I've had the digirig installed on this Panasonic FZG one tough pad for a long time. But the first time I ever installed it Windows Reddit, it installed the drivers. I had no problems. If you don't experience that same type of plug and play feature, you can go to digirig's website and download the drivers for Windows ten, Windows eleven, whatever you're using. So, but that was easy. So as soon as you plug. As soon as I plugged in this digirig, it came up

with the proper drivers on the proper comports. You just have to go into the device manager of Windows look and see what the comports are and make sure you set those accordingly. For WSJTX, there's certain settings I actually chose. In the menus of WSJTX, there is a drop down when you choose radio, so I just created a new profile. I called it digirig, and in the drop down for

the radio, I chose yesu FT eight ninety one. It kind of seemed to me like it was a little bit weird to have the Yasu FT eight ninety one and a menu for WSJTX, because the eight ninety one does not have a built in sound. But I guess Joe Taylor was smart enough to put all the radios in his drop down because things such as the digirig and signal Link and many other sound card devices have

existed for a long time. So I chose FT eight ninety one at my dropdown menu, and then I chose thirty eight thousand, four hundred for the boad rate, which we set in the radio a minute ago, and then pretty much everything else was by default, but I did have to set my comport on my computer. It was com six, which the digirig installs two comports, a sound

in and a sound out. That's normal, so you choose the sound in on the first option for WSJTX and then and then everything else was pretty much by default, but you do have to go over to the audio tab and choose the digirig for both your microphone and your speakers. If you've renamed it, it should just be digirig. If you haven't renamed it, then it might be it's probably called USB Audio Codec or something similar in that menu.

So that was basically all I did. Now, every time I have to plug this up, I take one USB to C cable I plugged into the digibrig, I plugged it into my tough pad, and I'm done. If I wanted to use my Evolved Maestro laptop, it would be the same thing. USBC to USBA or my Windows laptop. USBC to USBA I could do. On the Windows laptop, I could do USBC to USBC if I wanted to. And that's up to you depending on what connection you're using. So that's pretty much it I made. I think I

made about eight or nine contacts. So I didn't finish my PODA activation because because I left my charging cable. Now, the great thing about that tough pad is that it charges via twelve volt. It has a twelve volt charge. It has a twelve volt charger that you can buy an addition to it that's got a cigarette lighter plug. Of course, I just cut it off and put powerpools on it so I can charge it from my battery box. But

I left that charger at home. I didn't think it was gonna take me so long to get everything set up and configured and blah blah blah. Some of this I did yesterday, but I wanted to make sure I had all my ducks in the road and everything was working, so I didn't get enough time to actually activate the park. But that's okay. That just means I can do some sideband now. I've got my Explorer backpack with me. It's got all my stuff in it. Really enjoying this potable

Poda Abule antenna from the guys in Bayside, Texas. They make that. I'll put a link in the description blow for that. And that's actually like the second time ever I've used my thirty two foot spider beams mast. I don't use that one very much, but I'm like, you know, I'm gonna be running lower power than normal, lower power than what I am used to running, so I wanted the antenna up higher and it fits in this spot. From there, I could hang the feed point up a

little bit higher. Typically i'll hang the feed point down lower, but I raise the feed point up up to the top of that thirty two foot mast and it's working beautifully. I was hearing stations all over the USA, hearing some Kenadian stations, one or two Cuban stations and works some Poda ft eight thirty watts from the DR eight ninety one connected to the YAZUFT eight ninety one from Parks on the air today. Thanks for watching today, Guys, put a comment BLOW if you have any questions about this.

Links for everything I talked about will be in the description Blow and we'll catch you next time.