[WriteLog] CAT control of Yasesu FT-990

[Charles Morrison]

Last night, working Sartg, I had a terrible time getting the Cat control to
work correctly for the FT-990.

I've got the FCF-232 (Or whatever the correct model number is for it) and
hooked it to the radio.  I then went into the configuration of Writelog and
set it for Com1, auto and poll equals yes, etc (basically defaults).  These
were the things that I noted:

1. If polling is turned on, I lost sound from the speaker both internal and
external speaker, each time writelog polled the txcr, and the CAT light came
on.. is it supposed to do this?

2. I also noticed that with the polling on, the frequency would be displayed
in the radio control window, but it was TOTALLY incorrect.  It seemed to
display 2 separate frequencies, like 20708khz and 3500khz each time,
regardless of the true freq set via vfo.  But of course, because I lost all
audio output from the radio when it polled, I turned it off, which of course
didn't change the freq. In the radio control.  I had to manually enter it
each time for logging purposes.  Very inconvenient and didn't work as
supposed to.  See next.

3. When manually entering the frequency and turning polling off, I retained
what appeared to be all functionality except direct readout of freq. With
the radio.  Using the 232 line to key it for rtty worked, and I could
actually go into the radio control and change frequency and mode, etc.  But
I also noticed that if I turned off auto logging of frequency (because it
was WAYYYY incorrect), and used the radio control to change modes or bands,
it would revert back to auto retrieving the freq from the radio and then
logging the incorrect freq.  If I changed bands using radio control, and
then went back and disabled the auto logging of freq, then it would report
NO RIG! And I'd lose all control (ie: no keying from ANY of the F keys or
alt-k.)

Seems like something strange is going on, and I don't know what it is.  Does
this sound like a wierded out radio, bad 232 box, bad cabling, what?  This
same puter worked fine controlling my kenwood.  For any further info, I
tried auto baud, 4800 in the pgm, 4800 in control panel on the port, I
changed ports, I changed just about everything that I could think of.  Of
course, also note that I do NOT have a manual for this radio, (just
downloaded one and will look over it), but are there settings that I could
be missing?

Thanks

Charlie
KI5XP