I bought a new radio transciever: the Yaesu FT-991A / 2023-01-27

Eight and a half years and over 14000 contacts after I bought a Yaesu FT-857D I thought it was time to upgrade. The basic requirements haven't changed a lot: HF, 2 meter, 70 centimeter bands, SSB, Morse, FM, support for computer control. What I wanted to improve on is noise filtering, handling of strong adjacent signals and a waterfall display.

So the choice is the Yaesu FT-991A although I also looked at HF-only radios from Yaesu but decided on this one in the end. This will be the base station radio for a while and I will only use the FT-857D for operating away from home.

The basic installation went fine and I think this is a great amateur radio and good value for money. It is an advanced technological device so I had to dig into manuals and on-line documentation several times to get things set up the way I wanted it.

The good innovation is that the Yaesu FT-991A has an USB port on the back. This USB connection gives the computer 2 serial ports and audio over USB. The first serial port is for Computer Aided Tuning (CAT) control which can control the radio from the computer.

I directly wanted to set up an udev rule to map this to a fixed symlink so I can start rigtctld easily. The new rule:

SUBSYSTEM=="tty", ENV{ID_MODEL}=="CP2105_Dual_USB_to_UART_Bridge_Controller", \
        ATTRS{idVendor}=="10c4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="ea70", \
        ENV{ID_USB_INTERFACE_NUM}=="00", \
        SYMLINK+="ttyCATya"

The ENV{ID_USB_INTERFACE_NUM}=="00", filter only makes this rule activate on the first of the serial ports offered by the CP2105 chip.

My current experience is that the noise filtering is indeed better which helps a lot in the noisy RF environment at home.