FT8900 and proper settings

[wr7agt]

Hi all, getting more educated on this as we go. We have got the TS-480 up and running on a mountain top site and works great through the remote rig boxes.

Today, I installed an FT-8900 on a different tower site. It is connecting but I am noticing an odd behavior not seen in the TS-480. I used all the recommended settings for the FT88/8900 radios found in the manual and can connect normally. Both the radio and the remote rig box at the site is connected to a 12vdc battery bank of many hundreds of amps and is used as a backup source for our other equipment in the site.

The odd thing I am noticing is that at the remote site, my home, the display of the FT8900 control head flickers like it may turn off. This happens on average about once a minute or so. Unless it is a big flicker (about a half second) the audio down does not get interupted. Transmit audio seems to be unaffected by the flicker.

Advanced settings?? Can someone explain the RX jitter buffer size and delay, along with audio packet size. Is the jitter what I am seeing or something else. The site is fed with 2.5MB download, 4 mB upload. My home is a T1 with 1.5 both directions if that helps.

And CODEC, as I said I set as described in the manual, can this be changed to resolve such problems as I am seeing?

Thanks,

Tom

[sm2o]

Hi I looks like you have a interrupt on the internet connection. The jitter buffer settings and the codec setting only affect the audio. If the data package are lost or delayed to much it's nothing that can be done about it. If you increase the jitterbuffer settings you may not notice the audio interruptions if the audiopackage are just delayed, if they are missing there will be an interruption. Check that you do not have something which take all bandwidth periodiaclly, like a webcam or something else.

73 de mike

[N4TIC]

Hi Tom (and Mike)
Tom, see my post under the heading:
FT-8800 + Remoterig 1258 MKII-S not functional for long term use
I just reported my success with the FT-8900; but I also have the flicker happening on the 8900.  Audio is never affected - TX or RX, so no big deal to me but I do wonder why this is happening?  It is variable - some times it does it almost constantly and other times it does not do it at all.  Just thought that I would let you know about this.
Bill, N4TIC

[ve3pmk]

First of all I have several pairs of the 1258MKIIs units and I cannot say enough good things about them. That said I recently reconfigured a pair of units to remote a Yaesu FT-8900 and I'm finding the receive cuts out in symphony with screen flickers as does the TX audio and carrier. I have a Kenwood TS-480 as well as a Yaesu FT-857 remoted between the same two locations and do not find any significant problems, but the FT-8900 seems to be a bit problematic. Is it possible the 8900 control head & radio body communicate non-stop (at the known 19,200kbps data rate) and is less tolerant to latency? I only ask because the other two radios appear to perform flawlessly across the same two sites. I use an IPSec tunnel between sites so NAT is not an issue, and the routers are enterprise class so there are no appreciable delays created by them. The 8900 radio & units work flawlessly when on the same LAN, but across the tunnel the performance has intermittent dropouts ranging from every second to every several seconds.

The question: Are most users having the same observations and the 8900 is not the best choice for the application or am I missing something? The units are both V7 hardware builds and running 2.90 firmware.

If indeed the FT-8900 does not readily lend itself to remote use I can switch to another FT-857 or perhaps an Icom ID-2820 but before giving up I thought it worthwhile to ask the question.

Any experience or advice would be most welcome.

Thanks for reading!

Pat, VE3PMK

[ve3pmk]

Been awhile since my previous post on this but I've done a lot of tinkering with the screen flickering and TX/RX dropping when remoting the FT-8900.  Hope this follow-up helps anyone else trying to use the FT8900 from afar.

I have numerous pairs of RRC1258MkIIs units and tried both hardware v7 units and v5 units.
Same results, the screen flickers and the TX drops, but only for the duration of the flicker.
All units are running 2.90 firmware.

Other radios (TS-480 & FT-857) across the very same VPN don't exhibit any appreciable problems but there are other posts discussing the FT-8900 screen flicker so it's gotta be something specific about that model of radio. My guess is the head and body exchange data frequently and there's some watchdog timer (in either the radio body's CPU or the control head micro) kicking in when it does not see the data for more than a few tens of milliseconds.

All that said when the radio and control units are plugged into the same Ethernet switch (or even on the same LAN anywhere in the building) there are no problems, so the FT-8900 must be very unforgiving when the latency between the heard and body increases beyond a certain level.

After a lot of experimenting I managed to minimise (but not eliminate) the problem by moving that particular radio/control RRC pair to a second tunnel connection (3G on one end, ADSL2+ on the other) and then going to the advanced section of both the radio and control units and setting the UDP cmd min-data-size to 50. Putting the units on the secondary connections alone helped a little but increasing the minimum UDP packet size seems to help a lot. I also set the radio side's RTP tx mode to Squelch and the control side RTP tx mode to Normal. The flickers and TX dropouts have gone from every few seconds to one or two every couple of minutes or so. The "screen blank or dark" duration is now very short, as in blink and you'll miss it. So it's not a fix, but the problem is almost negligible for casual repeater chatter.

73,
Pat

[iu2idk]

Hello, I'm upping this topic because I think is quite complete for the Yaesu 8900.

I'd need to connect it to a remoterig set and put it in a house quite far from where I live, but in a good position.

Can I ask you if I'll have the complete control of the radio on the front panel at my house? I'd need to switch on/off the radio, change the frequency and set on/off the X-RPT function (cross band).

I've read that there are some flickering screen issues with this radio, which in my case would not be a huge problem. The main point is to be able to check the intensity of the received signal and do the above mentioned tasks.

Could it be a good choice, with the current firmwares and software versions? 

Thanks in advance for the help

[sm2o]

Hi

Remoterig transfer alla data sent between the frontpanel and the radio body so all functions are supported

73 demike

[iu2idk]

Thank you!

One second, more strange, question:  whit a 1258MKIIs set used on a FT8900, having the radio body and the front panel connected through an internet connection, will it be possible to access to the radio using the RRC Nano app for Android?
I think that the 1258MKIIs connected to the radio body will have to generate an IP server, probably this server is reachable also by the various apps (like also  PocketRxTx).

If it is possible, will it be possible also to transmit while the X-RPT function is on, entering in the radio from a mobile app? Because with the radio, in normal condition, this is not possible. (When X-RPT function is active, PTT is disabled). So I was wondering if this could be possible because of the different way of controlling the radio.

Thank you for your help

[sm2o]

No

You should see Remoterig as an extension of the cable between the frontpanel and the radio, it's not adding any interface. To use the Nano app a CAT interface with a public protocol is needed, FT-8900 has no CAT interface

73 de mike