Yaesu FTM-400XDR, ADMS-7 and RT Systems FTM400.

This isn't a review - it's really just a post about what happened when I pulled the radio out of the box.. and tried to program it.

By itself, it was all easy and straight forward. Enter callsign, push a couple of buttons and done.

Then I thought I'd try their  ADMS-7 software to start programming.

The first guide I found told me to take the microSD card that I'd installed, format it, and back up the radio to it. I'd need to do that in order to give the software an idea of what the radio was so I could do further programming. 

Straight off the bat, it would tell me it couldn't read the card. Handy huh?

I tried the USB cable. It wouldn't talk to the radio that way, and come up with a comms error. The whole thing started to smell like something was faulty. Not exactly something I really wanted to hear after my day chasing this radio.

A quick Google, and I found a lot of people complaining about this software as being quite simply useless. The suggestion was to go to RT Systems and purchase their FTM400 Programmer.  So I did.

Straight away, I was able to communicate with the radio. I was able to configure.. then later tweak the APRS configuration. I was able to pull an entire list of repeaters directly from RepeaterBook, cull it and set them into memory. 

It was fairly disappointing that a radio that cost *that much* had software that out of the box wouldn't work, yet a third party's paid app *just worked*.

RT Systems is located at https://www.rtsystemsinc.com/

The US$25 was worth it to avoid the frustration with Yaesu's software. The software just worked, and let me get back on track to doing what I wanted to do - play with the damned radio rather than fighting with stupid little problems with poorly designed software. 

If you've got one of these radios, have issues, and you've landed here, just spend the extra $25 and buy the software from RT Systems.. or write your own. 

 

Look at that, it just works!