Programming a Yaesu FT-60 Radio using Chirp

Continuing Wednesday's radio programming theme, here's a video on how to program an FT-60 with chirp:

The Video

If you didn't take notes of all that, you're in luck because I did.  Here they are:

1. Connect cable.  (Remember, you want the FTDI cable, not the one requiring the crazy drivers you'd have to download from hinkychinesewebsite.com)
2. Power the radio on while holding the MONI button – it's the middle button on the LHS, the one with the dot on it.
3. You will see a menu.  Scroll around with DIAL knob until you find CLONE. (I think it's item #8)
4. Press the FW button (bottom RHS of keypad).  Screen will flash off, then come back on with the same CLONE display.
5. Fire up chirp.
6. Now for menus: radio > make&model; port > figure out the USB port; usually it'll have "usbserial" in the name.  It definitely won't be any of the "bluetooth" ports!
7. Press PTT on the radio – hold the PTT button down a few seconds, then quickly hit OK on the pop-up panel in chirp.  TX and progress bar will appear as it downloads to computer.
8. Save the blank file!!!
9. Edit settings in chirp as you see fit.  Save to another file.
10. Back to the radio, press MONI button; this will switch radio display to RX.
11. Back to chirp, radio > upload to radio.  Now hit OK; should see progress bar as programming uploads.
12. Turn radio off, unplug cable.
13. Turn radio on, flip to memory mode (V/M, lower left corner) and test your handiwork.

Finally, your hearing is not going bad; the audio actually does fade at the end of the video.

Whew, glad to have this done.  Much thanks to Tony KD8RTT for the video.  I didn't have a lot of channels to add to my radio, having previously manually programmed many in, but I did add the recieve-only weather channels (wikipedia reference link).  It's a lot of steps to go through, but it is not bad and it all actually seems to work.  I'm sure this will come in handy when I want to really swap things up for some future adventure.

Tomorrow: less geekery, more mountain bike action.

ps 2/22/20: If you need to program by hand, there's a great one-pager instruction sheet here: http://k6lcs.com/Docs_files/QP-FT-60R.pdf  It's really easy, but it is time consuming if you have more than a few channels to program.  Definitely worth it to buy a good cable and use chirp.