Digital Interface to My Yaesu FT-950- part 1

 Slow scan TV and PSK31 became popular using a PC with built in sound card and free shareware on the internet which prompted a group of local Ham operators to try these new digital modes for ourselves. We had already tried TNC's and standalone "dumb" terminals to access local BBS connected Nodes but these newer digital modes really peaked our interest. 

  I was a little slower to try mainly because my radios were older ,less stable radios. The local group was on every Friday on 6m using SSTV so I eventually fabricated a interface with audio transformers and a transistor circuit for keying.This set up was useable but several years later I upgraded radios and modified My interface with custom cables to plug into a switch box and Data inputs on a Yaesu 857 and My newly purchased Yaesu FT-950. 

  It was fun to finally have a setup working good for SSTV , PSK31 and Olivia. I also eventually was able to figure out AFSK RTTY for contesting and added CAT to both radios I was using which helped to make contesting band changes easier.

   I used this setup from about 2008 till 2016 which was about the time I took some time away from Ham radio--this was right before FT8 really took off. When I waded back into the Ham radio world, some basic things had changed like I now had a reconfigured Win 7 PC I had upgraded to Win10 instead of My old Win XP desktop. The Win10 laptop had no serial ports so I needed 232 converters to use the digital modes and some software was not as friendly for a new operating system as windows XP had been. It took some time but I finally was able to have digital working---kind of--but not reliably. The drivers for the converters were old and had been made for win XP or older OS and they needed to have PC restarted sometimes to be recognized. I also found hardware and cable issues-- My original setup was getting old and had just too many interface cables. The picture above shows the mess after I removed it.

  It was time to consider other options. I decided I wanted a simple hardware interface with fewer cables and FSK capability and more reliable CAT interfacing.Part 2 I will discuss My choices and what I finally ended up purchasing.

73 for now---Tim