Saturday, November 13, 2021

Programming a Yaesu VX-6 with Chirp

I've moved to Melbourne, Victoria, and my 2m hand held radio didn't have any of the local frequencies in it. It's a real grind to program memories through the keyboard and, while I'd done a few, I'd also made mistakes along the way.

A serial cable was purchased from AliExpress and this morning I got it going.

The cable came with some software on a mini CD ROM but I don't have a way to read those so the next step was to get Chirp. I tried it on macOS, Linux and finally Windows, before the UI told me what I needed to do to get started..

Turns out, with a VX-6, you need to hold the F/W button down during power on and then press BAND to start the upload from radio to Chirp. (Those instructions weren't visible on macOS or Linux for some reason).

In the end, I threw away my own memories and grabbed the Chirp CSV file from the WIA which has all of the repeaters in it, with names showing the call signs. Great stuff WIA!

Uploading to the radio is similar, power on with F/W but then push V/M to start download. It took a few attempts to get all this to work, it seems timing sensitive.

Anyhow, now my radio is filled with repeaters and I was very happy to find that I could trigger the Macedon repeater, VK3RMM, from home for the first time. (Clearly I had something wrong with my manual configuration).

Note that the CSV file from the WIA which could be imported by Chirp was from the file titled "Example VBScript, Sorted Directory csv and CHIRP csv files and other csv formats WiaRep2 211009.zip" from this page.

My sincere thanks to whoever put this file together.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

There are a LOT of repeater licenses around the south east. In my experience a lot are either off air or idle. I occasionally put the RSP1A SDRPlay on 2m and, *tumbleweeds*. OK I'm not in the best location. But I can see all of 2m on the waterfall and the FM activity is sparse. A lot of nets use the band so I guess it's a matter of listening at the right time. Anyway it is always good to have a 'loaded' 2m HT. You'll need it someday! -- VK3HN.