Bluetooth CAT for Yaesu FT1000 mark V

A HAM contacted me to have one of my CAT-to-bluetooth dongles for his Yaesu FT1000 mark V. Well, that's a transceiver I have only heard of, never seen either in real-life or pictures. I looked up the user's manual online and studied it a bit.

The "one thousand" has a CAT interface with RS232 levels (-12V/+12V), opposed to pseudo-TTL of FT8x7's (5V/0V), so my dongle cannot work on it.

But this characteristic makes the FT1000 easier to interface over Bluetooth, because there are ready-made adapters on the market. Their price varies from about 18USD to 70USD, depending on the source and packaging (you need a "slave" one, that's most common anyway). Those devices need a power supply, usually of 5 volts, that can be easily derived from one of the unused accessory ports on the back of the FT1000: I suggested to take 9V from the DVS-2 port and convert them with a 78L05 and a couple of decoupling capacitors. That's it.

Well, don't forget to configure the RS232-to-BT dongle at 4800 baud, 8N2, as detailed in the Yaesu manual. How-to do it depends on the Bluetooth adapter you've got.

And no, I am not going to build these adapters for FT1000, unless someone sends me a similar transceiver to test them on :-)