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Hi Bruno,

Sorry, I did not mean to insult the radio or their designers.? It is by far my favorite all-mode / all band / satellite rig that I've owned.? Just some of the decisions made when they designed the user interface leave me a bit baffled.? It appears to me that they defined a set of use cases and focused the design on them, but they took the cases as separate things instead of what has evolved to wanting to do ALL of them without moving any cables.? My other radios have a single jack in the back for all the modes.? (And, apologies for conflating Mode with Band.? Yes, the DIN is for the FM modes, with the TRS for the others.)

I understand that predicting the future is difficult, but it seems they tried too hard to make things easy, and in my opinion made it harder instead.? It's an all too common problem in user interface design.? There's a "law of things" related to this, which I have found true:? "The structure of a product matches the structure of the organization that created it" (aka "Conway's Law").? It would not surprise me if there were separate teams working on the "digital" and FM sections and their respective interfaces.? Each optimized their design for their use case in isolation, all the way out to the back panel plug.? Anyone who doesn't align with those specific use cases ends up having more work to do, which as things tend to evolve quickly, is pretty common.?

Contrast this with the FT-817/818, which has a single DIN connector that feeds any of the modes depending on the radio's setting, with that mode being settable via CAT as well.? I have one configured with a Raspberry Pi running Direwolf, FLDigi, WSJT-X, JS8Call, QSSTV, and probably a few others yet to come, depending on what I want to do at the time.? No moving of cables, no external switching, no secondary (and costly!) interface boxes, perfectly forward-compatible.? Just a few wires and a PTT level shifter for the software that isn't CAT-aware.? Simple.? Done.

A clarification.? My use of the term "overload" was from the engineering lingo, meaning that one interface serves multiple different functions.? In this case, as you note, the TRS input combines both PTT and Audio - two separate functions - on one pin.? It has nothing to do with having too much voltage or power, and is a very common interface, universally used with HTs for example.? I did not mean to imply it was a problem; just stating how it worked as different from the DIN port which has them separate.? My point was that either method is probably fine, but pick one.

After all that, a question:? Your comment about the audio source chosen when keying the rig from CAT has me puzzled.? If not from the front (Mike ) input, where is the audio selected from?

Thanks for the feedback,

Greg? KO6TH