Four years ago, I mentioned that I had purchased a discone antenna and some (unintended) coax to install in the attic, primarily intended for SDR use, but secondarily for having some sort of dual band radio in the house, probably my FTM-100DR.

I finally did that.

Sparing absolutely no expense by using four zipties to mount it to a handy rafter brace, the antenna works quite well up there. It is quite unweildy assembled, so I brought it up in the attic unassembled and put it together pretty much in place.

My desk is in a converted sunroom, so the simplest way to get the coax down was to drill in the plywood ceiling then conceal the wiring in plastic ducting.

I also added a CAT5/6 cable to provide wired LAN to my desk. I hope to redeploy my RemoteRig and operate HF from here soon!

With the antenna up, it was time to figure out the radio. This is a small desk that I tend to keep crowded, so I knew I needed to keep it space efficient. Because the LMR-400 is pretty stiff, it was going to be best parallel to the wall, so I would need to “remote” the control head. I originally had this radio installed in my car, with the remote cable fairly permanently installed. When I upgraded the car radio to the FTM-400, I left that cable in place and left the 400’s remote cable in it’s box. Hurray!

The 400’s accessories also include a mounting bracket. The instructions only show it deployed with adhesive tape, however it has a bend in it that would suggest attaching it to something like a car sun visor, if any of them were that thin anymore.

What can be that thin is plywood. I have placed the power supply on the desk, a rectangular piece of plywood under the radio (turned sideways) with the control head mounted on one end of it.

The other end of the plywood is against the wall, (mostly) steadying the control head for button pushing.

After verifying that I could hit several of the repeaters that were already in the radio’s memory, I set about getting in on WIRES-X.

There is a slightly sad tale here. The data cable for the FTM-100 obviously came with it. I’ve had it for years. It stayed in my car for a long time because that’s where the radio was. The FTM400 uses the same cable, so now I have two of them.

Somewhere.

Even currently unemployed, I reached the point where I’d rather buy the replacement cable than keep fruitlessly searching for either of the TWO cables that I KNOW I have. So, naturally, I would put the wrong one in my cart and order the cable for the FT3D handheld, for which I do already have the cable in hand. I would ironically discover this when I got home from a trip that involved a stop at Plano’s Ham Radio Outlet, where I could have picked up the correct cable, had only I have known two hours earlier.

Since I was experimenting with WIRES-X anyway, I looked at my now-four-years-old registration attempt and it was with the radio ID for the FTM100, which makes sense; that was the radio I had then. However, at the time that registration was submitted, I had never actually brought the radio up online, I had never activated that registration. I still had my credentials, logged on, updated the radio ID to my FT3D because I have a functioning data cable for it and tried to get it activated.

It was quite insistent on this error. I consulted a couple of people experienced in such matters and the consensus was that I should try to register it as a new device with new rooms, etc. I submitted all that and waited. Back in 2021, when I first registered the FTM100, I received a reply from the WIRES server team in about 24 hours. This time, it had been several days with no reply. I decided to submit a ticket on the bad registration, still planning to have two devices registered. Miraculously, I received both the new registration email and an update for the old registration at the same time, three hours later. 🙂

After that, it pretty much just about came up working. Since the program won’t let you in to mess up any settings until it connects successfully, I had no bad settings to go fix. 🙂

I spend most of the time parked on TEXAS NEXUS because some buddies and a couple of local repeaters are frequently there.

At this point, I have not yet connected the FT3D to WIRES-X because I have not figured out how to use it on the same laptop without trashing the FTM100 config. Research ensues.