I recently bought an FT-818 to accompany my FT-817 to work portably on linear satellites. In this article I will show you how to set up Gpredict properly.

At home I use Gpredict for doppler correction under Windows. Gpredict is free software, but requires Hamlib/rigctl(d) for cat control. Hamlib is not self-explanatory because it is not a ready-made software. You have to create the individual parameters yourself. The necessary information can be found in Hamlib's Gitlab.

So you have to create a command for each transceiver. Since I use 2 transceivers for full-duplex, I have to create 2 commands.

The most important thing is to find out the ID of your transceiver. The list can be found here: https://github.com/Hamlib/Hamlib/wiki/Supported-Radios

For me it is ID 1020 for Yaesu FT-817 and 1041 for Yaesu FT-818.

FT-817 and FT-818 have slight differences in the CAT commands. Therefore there are 2 profiles. (This is also the reason why the current version of SatPC32 currently does not work with the FT-818. Only the FT-817 is supported there.)

Wow. Now I was also affected by it: My power amplifiers from the FT-817 blew up. After several hundred SOTA and /p activations it happened at home while I was listening to SSB satellites. Especially with the old non-ND versions (like mine) the power amplifier starts to oscillate by itself and destroys itself by self-oscillation then. The older MITSUBISHI RF POWER MOS FET 2SK2975 were not that good. I had already read a lot about this on the internet. The FT-817 suddenly became very hot and had a permanent current consumption of 2 amps. It was clear then that the FETs were short-circuited.

After I kept seeing new SSTV images sent from the ISS on Twitter, I thought I'd give it a try too. Since I've been doing a lot of radio via FM amateur radio satellites lately anyway, I have a small 4 element LogPer directional antenna at the window anyway.

The free open source Android software "Robot36" was often recommended as software. I was very surprised when it gave a very clear picture even without a cable between my handheld radio and my mobile phone. In Robot36, however, you should select the mode manually and not leave it to chance whether "auto" works. Currently PD120 was used, which is what ARISS announced (see original message below).

I was able to achieve very good results with my Yaesu FT2 and FT4. With every pass I could decode at least 1 complete picture. The antenna was always an Anjo 4 ele logper held out of the window on a 2m wooden broomstick and the ISS was tracked via the Android app "ISS Detector".

Recently, I saw a newcomer's post on Twitter regarding his first WSJT-X session. I noticed right away that he only decoded a handful of stations, but those with supposedly extremely good reports. This is what happens when you set your receive bandwidth extremely low. This means that you only receive signals that lie within this range. If we remember again our education, we find out that a normal report refers to a bandwidth of 2.5kHz. In this articel I explain the fundamentals about that.

Some time ago I already built some "loose" interfaces for my FT-817. I used these later on my FT-891. The CAT, respectively the FTDI USB to serial converter I needed at the FT-8x7, I don't need at the FT-891 anymore, because it already has CAT via USB integrated. The FT-891 simply uses a Silicon Labs CP2105-F01 USB/Serial UART converter internally. As with many other TRXs, this is not galvanically isolated, but the engineers thought of something. Apparently it works well anyway. I have had no problems at least in the last 2 years. In this article I show you my solution for this problem.