Digimodes on the Yaesu FT-450D

This is how the rig is connected to the computer:

• The rear panel has a 6 pin data socket that I have connected to the PC using a custom cable. The cable has 2x 3.5mm jacks and a USB connector (this has a serial port inside) - COM3 but this is not used to control PTT in this implementation. HRD does all the PTT switching via the CAT connector below
• The rear panel also has an RS232 connector for the CAT control (including PTT) that I connected to the PC using another custom cable. This one just has a USB connector with another serial port inside - COM5
• The jacks are fed into a USB sound card. - The transmit I have labelled in Windows as "TX to FT-450D" and receive is labelled "RX from FT-450D"
• I fed the output from the front of the rig (headphone connector) into another sound card using a 3.5mm jack to jack cable - this time a video capture card with audio inputs.

FT-450D set in datamode on 20m ready for PSK-31

I use Ham Radio Deluxe to control the rig and for most digimodes it is really straight forward. I set the radio to 14.070 MHz on 20m USB and had a listen. There were many stations showing up on the waterfall.

Waterfall display from HRD

To properly operate digimodes on the FT-450D set it to USB DATA. To do this:

• press the F key on the rig 
• Use the DSP/SEL knob to select D Type and then press the knob 
• The default is RTTY. Turn the knob until USER-U is selected 
• Press the DSP/SEL knob again 
• Finally press the F key for more than 1 second.

What this does is re-reroute audio from the PC to go via the "Data" socket on the rear. It also cuts out the microphone so shack noises aren't also transmitted.
Save it into a conventient memory on the rig for future recall.

An alternative way of doing this is to use Ham Radio Deluxe to do it for you. However I have found a bug in the software that doesn't save the USER-U into memory of HRD. I will report it to the people at HRD.

Even though USER-U is shown here it
is not possible to save this mode into
a favourite (memory) within HRD

As can be seen USER-U or USER-L is not an option
PSK or PSK-R do not work either as the resultant mode is just USB or LSB - no data