Greetings from Idaho. My name is Steve Galbraith . My callsign is KB7ITU. I am one of 6 digital trainers for the area. We use the digital modes for emergency communications. I knew that the digirig was beginning to get popular so decided i should buy one and learn how to help others set it up. What a breeze. In 10 minutes I had it working with my kenwood ht and in another 10 minutes I had it woking on my kenwood tm-v71a. If you are going to use it on VARA FM you will need , in some cases to cutt the trace between the two pads marked att. The audio is a little too high for that mode. Once I cut the trace it worked with no problem. What a great product and price.
Richard,
For Kenwood TM-V71A you can use the same cables set as Yaesu FT-8xx transceivers. The only difference is that for CAT control Digirig needs to be in RS-232 configuration
So all I need for the V71A is the Digirig with the RS-232 option and the “Yaesu FT-8xx cords for Digirig Mobile”? I don’t need the “Yaesu and Icom 9600 baud MiniDin6 audio cable”, right? 73
Yes, that will get you going. If at some point you decide to try 9600 baud you can replace 1200 baud cable that came with Yaesu FT-8xx kit with that one. In most of the modes you will not see any difference, but you might get faster winlink sessions.
Thank you, Denis! Actually I’d really like to do 9600 straight out - that’s very much my aim for Winlink sessions via VARA FM wide. I don’t suppose there’s a slightly more efficient way to acquire the 9600 baud 6 pin and the serial 8 pin without the redundant 6 pin in the Yaesu set?
I’m trying to debug an issue I’m having with a second-hand DigiRig v1.9 + Kenwood TM-V71A combo I purchased a few months ago that I’m just getting around to setting up. I already have this combo, both units purchased brand new, running as a mobile rig with a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ in my truck and it works perfectly. Using the exact same OS configuration but with this used DigiRig and radio, I’m having audio level issues where even setting the recording level to 6% (lowest possible) in alsamixer in Ubuntu, Dire Wolf still complains of audio levels being too high with some being around 120-150. I also tried setting this same thing up in Windows and the same issue with high audio levels occurs.
EDIT: I decided to cut the trace between the two ATT pads as a test, knowing I could resolder them together if needed, however I don’t need to because it works now! I set the Capture level to 56 and now Dire Wolf is reporting audio levels between 40-70.
