Saturday, February 8, 2020

Chinese CT-62 USB cat cable.

My original Yaesu CT-62 cat cable has a serial connector which is not very common nowaday.
So i ordered a Chinese clone for less than 6 euro incl shipping.
As soon as it arrived i decided to test this cat cable on my FT-817 and HamRadioDeluxe.
The cable was recognized on my Windows 10 pc, but it gave read errors while starting HRD.
So time for some measurements.... First open the USB connector and do this very careful to avoid dammage of the plastic enclosure.
You will see a small pcb with 3 wires and a uart ic.
With a multimeter i measured the mini din connector on the other side of the cable and concluded that the tx and rx wires on the small pcb where reversed...
Red and White wires are reversed soldered on the pcb

                                     This is how it should be! White wire is RX and Red wire is TX.
After changing the RX / TX wires the Chinese CT-62 cable works fine.

Yaesu FT-817ND battery replacement

Altough my FT-817 is not much used since i bought it new 10 years ago, the battery has lost it’s power and could not be fully charged anymore.
The original batterypack FNB-85 is quite expensive and due to the fact that i hardly operate on battery i decided to replace it by a third party battery as sold on ebay.
For less than 20 USD incl shipping you get this:


This Cameron Sino FNB85TW replaces the original pack and has the same dimension as the original battery.


Fits perfect. Charged and tested the FT-817 on battery power and it’s up and running again.