Winston Lawrence

Note: this setup leaves DMR enabled to allow my DMR radios to continue to access the hotspot and adds YSF to the mix, allowing the FT3DR to access YSF, FCS and bridged WIRES-X rooms. I did play around with enabling YSF2DMR but I am not certain that it was playing well DMR also being active. For my specific use case I just need the FT3DR to gain access to Yaesu network stuff as I can always use one of my DMR radios to access the hotspot and go out to Brandmeister and/or TGIF.
1. Pistar configuration

The MMDVMHOST configuration is as follows:

The Yaesu system fusion configuration is below:

The hotspot seems to work better with the Wires-X passthru feature disabled. Disabled means that commands are handled by the hotspot instead of being transmitted through to whatever system/room the hotspot is connected to (AFAIK). As shown:
1. Apply Changes.
2. Next step, connect to your pi-star (using your transceiver).
3. Connect to YSF room: #00002 (YSF00002 - Link to YSF2DMR).
4. Pressing search and direct on your screen
5. Select Search&Direct, then select ID (directly input ID of group)
6. Input your DMR TG ID with leader zerroes up to 5 digits. For example: Estonian DMR group: TG24810 you must enter: 24810. For Russian DMR Group TG2503 , you must enter 02503.
7. To exit and go back to your local "YSF Startup Host:" switch to DMR TG:4000 (like described in chapter: 8) go to #04000.
These are my notes taken from configuring and programming the Yaesu FT3DR:
1. Start with a backup from the radio

This has been excellent, probably mandatory advice for every radio that I have programmed so far .. seriously, if you are getting NOT COMPLETED errors reading the micro SD Card data from the FT3DR then it is quite likely that the BACKUP.DAT data file on the SD Card does NOT contain information from your actual FT3DR radio it was generated by the ADMS-11 software, contains generic data, and the FT3DR radio is protecting you from yourself (in a kind of ham-fisted way). Do not continue go back, start over and write the radio settings to the micro SD card and then open and use that BACKUP.DAT file in the ADMS-11 program.

Fair warning, I did not read the FT3DR manual so the "how" may be a non-issue for those that read manuals before pointing, clicking and testing. In this case, I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to open the backup.dat data file that was stored on the micro sd card. From a normal windows application UI perspective, you expect all file access operations to be located under the "File" tab. I don't normally consider myself as communicating with an SD card but you guessed it - micro SD card operations are under the "communications" tab where you can "Get from SD card" and "send to we SD card". When you "send to SD card" the backup.dat file with the radio settings is written to the card.

The USB cable did not come with the FT3DR but as it turned out, that USB cable is used for firmware updates and not for programming. The Yaesu SCU39 cable or the Yaesu SCU19 USB cable are the ones needed for programming. The other programming option, other than manually entering information on the radio, is to use the micro SD card as previously noted along with Yaesu's free ADMS-11 software. To get started, remove the micro SD card from the radio and plug it into your computer

You access the micro SD card from the Communications tab not the File tab that you would normally expect from a windows app. Choose the option "get data from SD card(D)" This will quickly populate the spreadsheet like ADMS-11 screen with data from the backup.dat file. The screen interface is fairly intuitive for manually adding frequencies or a repeater. If you are new, like me, to Yaesu and system fusion then some of the terms and values are'nt going to mean anything (AMS or FM?) at this point it is worth taking some time and RTFM (read the fine manual). Of course, I'm impatient and want to get to the good stuff fast. I already know a lot of local repeaters from working with DMR and since most of them came via repeaterbook.com I also know that some of those repeaters support Fusion as well as DMR, IRLP, Allstar, Echolink etc. I hop over to repeaterbook; set up a proximity search; and see that there is an option to download a Yeasu FT3DR compliant CSV file ready for import. Sweet! How did repeaterbook know?

I downloaded the repeaterbook export files, but every time I tried to import the .csv file, the ADMS-11 program would stop the import with a message that the file could not be imported. I looked at the .csv with a spreadsheet program but didn't at first see the problem, but trying the .csv file a few lines at a time, and looking carefully the problem became clear.

This is my solution, which is not necessarily the only solution. If you have a different method please let me know. Taking a look at the exported .CSV file appears to show that everything is okay but the Yaesu ADMS11 program fails to import the repeater data. If you look closely at the CSV file you will notice that some records appear like the following:


The TX value is zero and the offset adjustment shows "+/-". These values need to be changed to the following:


The TX value is set to the same as the RX value (instead of zero) and the Offset application is turned OFF. Once these changes are made the repeaterbook.com csv export should import without any more problems.
Once the file is imported you can fine-tune the entries add comments etc and then save the file using the "Communications" tab and "Send data to SD card(U)".

Safely eject the micro SD card from the computer and put it back into the FT3DR. From the radio menu choose SD Card - Backup - Read from SD card. If everything works well the data is read into the radio which will reboot. If everything does not work well then the import will fail with an error message or will be "stuck" reading but never completing. Go back and reread the first paragraph of this article - you probably did NOT use a backup.dat file generated from the radio when you did the repeaterbook.com .csv import. So read, rinse, and repeat :)