DAX TX with hardware PTT

K1DBO · February 2016

I'm having trouble sending voice to my 6500 via the DAX TX channel while using a hardware PTT switch. VOX and MOX work fine But, the hardware PTT switch seem to only key the physically connected mics. I can see that making sense in many cases, but it's not what I'm looking to do. Am I missing something? The interface to SDRCat has me thinking that I can map a hardware serial port to an SDRCat PTT port but I'm not at all sure it means what I think it means.

Mark_WS7M · February 2016

I had a similar question asking if the PC input could be keyed with a footswitch. It is actually disabled and I think DAX would be too for some reason. Tim explained it but I think it needs to be reconsidered.

Barry N1EU · February 2016

The only thing you're missing is a previous recent thread that discovered the same thing.

Barry N1EU

K1DBO · February 2016

As it turns out... you can use a hardware PTT to key the DAX TX channel. It might even work to key the PC remote input as well but I didnt test that. I just used SDRCat to map a hardware (existing) serial port on the computer as a PTT port. Then, I put a cable together to short a couple of pins with a footswitch, yada yada, footswitch now keys DAX TX.

I was expecting to short pins 5 and 7 to make this happen. Maybe I did. But my meter seems to be telling me I'm shorting pins 7 and 8. I'll take a closer look for crossed wires later. But for now, everyone can rest easy knowing they can use a footswitch.

While it would be nice to use the hardware PTT inputs on the radio itself, this solution only requires a simple cable and even allows taking the footswitch to a remote computer.

Now if I could just get the footswitch to enable/disable VOX instead... but that might take external software.

...of course this was probably already mentioned in a previous post too.

DAX TX with hardware PTT

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