Over the weekend I cracked out some gear to move the remote radio project on. I made several sets of cables to connect the remote rig interfaces to my FT-847 via a microham microkeyer several weeks ago, but I had never tested them. Audio/PTT are handled with one RJ45 port, CW via a second RJ-45 port and the CAT interface via an RS232 serial server meaning that I had to make up three pairs of cables. It seemed sensible to test the cables back to back (i.e. without remote rig network routing) to check that I have made them correctly before attacking the network issues so I found a suitable RJ45 double female connector and a double female RS232 cable to do just that. The photos below shows thw kitchen floor workshop. The first pic looks like a normal CAT set up, but the second shows the back to back cables in place.
The good news is that the TX audio, PTT and CAT all work perfectly. Due to the way that the remote rig kit handles CW, the back to back test won’t work but that cable is simple so should be easy to trouble shoot if I have made a mistake. The real problem was rx audio – there wasn’t any! It looks like I forgot to route the rx audio to both the microkeyer and to a speaker/headphone jack. Today’s job is to rectify that and repeat the audio tests as soon as possible.
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