radio-stuff

Programming the Yaesu FT5D

Problem to solve

Configure all swiss (HB) radio repeaters listed on the USKA page on my Yaesu FT5D(E) handheld radio.

Solution

Unsuccessful attempts

A first attempt was to reverse engineer the binary format of the backup or the memory export.

Setup

I later discovered, that Yaesu offers the software called “ADMS-14” directly from their FT5D product page (download link). I used version 1.0.1.0 of ADMS-14.

Working on a Linux system, I installed wine (along with all fonts) and ran ADMS-14 from there.

General approach

The general process is to:

  1. transfer the FT5D backup file to my computer.
  2. load the backup file into ADMS-14 locally.
  3. download and transform the list of swiss radio repeaters.
  4. import the list of repeaters into the loaded configuration file in ADMS-14.
  5. save the file.
  6. transfer the updated backup file back to the radio using the SD card and “restore” the backup.

But let’s take this step by step.

Loading the backup file in ADMS-14

From the “Communications” menu, use “Get data from SD card” to load a backup file.

Transforming the list of repeaters

I noticed that ADMS-14 allows to import a CSV file. To find out, what this was all about, I created a CSV export first to discover, that the export contains the “Memories”, i.e. pre-configured VHF/UHF frequencies, offsets, modes, etc. Since re-importing the export.csv file worked, I knew about the expected CSV format.

With some trial and error, I manually refactored the list of repeaters from USKA to match the exported format.

Outcome

Currently, the list of repeaters is at the version of the 2025-08-04. Here are the final list in CSV format:

  1. Working copy, including convenience header line.
  2. Cleaned up, padded, importable CSV.

Remaining required modifications to the working copy are:

  1. Remove the CSV header line. This one is for convenience only.
  2. Pad the trailing entries up to 900 by adding the following lines: N,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,0, where N is the incrementing index of the line up to 900 (which is the last entry).

Remaining work

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