Yaesu VX-7R programming…
The VX-7R is one of my favourite HTs because it is rugged, more or less waterproof in 2026 (I was able to replace the main case seal and top port cover via Yaesu, but the charge port is something I 3d printed in TPU, the STL is HERE). The full keypad means that when a UK station asks to QSY, it is not hard to type in a frequency and move.
I got the VX-7R a few years ago, and bought a programming cable off Amazon or eBay. I was able to programe the radio, but I had put a wrong frequency in one of the memories, which had been bugging me. So, I plug things in, and the connection fails. It is a new computer, on Windows 11, so I assume the issue is the driver. I spent hours trying to install an older driverfor the Prolific chip, then tried the Win10 Surface, then even tried the studio scanner computer that is on Win7.
The solution is more of a question: how did this work in the past? I found this post which shows the Prolific board and its wiring, and mine was not wired this way (and confirmed the post with a couple of other references): mine had the white cable directly connected to TX. So I got a diode out of the drawer, fixed the soldering and the cable instantly worked to read from the radio! So if your cable is wired wrong, get a 1N4148, solder it between the RX and TX pads with the black line on TX, white cable on RX, then tape/glue the case closed.
You can use Chirp, but I think the VX7 Commander has more relevant settings for the radio, including icons and things. You can download VX7 Commander HERE. I was easily able to copy from the radio, but writing to the radio kep failing. The fix for this (after hours of trying all kinds of things) came from this forum, and is super simple: in VX7 Commander go to Settings/Port, set your COM port, then click on the little box to the right with an “!” on it. Change the value to 17. This slows down the “default write delay” in the transfer, and changing it from 15 to 17 was all that was needed.
The moral of the story is… Don’t give up? Or maybe “if it worked in the past, it might not work today”. Or something along these lines. But also, GPT really really did not help, the robot said to try things that don’t exist, and was unable to go out and actually search, and parse forum threads. It had no idea there could be a wiring issue. It had no idea that there was this other setting. So do try using good old fashioned search and read, as though we were in 2024. Maybe one day AI will help, but this reality is not the present.
Filed under: blog,DIY - @ May 31, 2026 10:44 am
Tags: programming, vx-7r, vx7 commander, yaesu