Digital Modes

The xiegu g90 is capable of doing digital modes like ft8 or winlink. It can be cat controlled and there are a lot of different accesories, some of them from xiegu other from third parties. If you lookup on internet about how to use the g90 for digital modes, all the information that you will find will tell you that you have to buy some piece of equipment.

I'm here to tell you that's not true, you only will need a single cable that can be made by yourself for free if you have old cables or for 5 euros or so if you buy everything. Having these fancy interfaces is more comfortable and can be required on some scenarios but they are not an aboslute requirement to do digital modes like ft8.

How to create an acc cable

This is the diagram of the required cable. You wil need two male 3.5 jack connectors and a single 8 pin mini-din connector. I used some spare ehternet cable also.

The minidin connector is a little difficult to solder so be patient, but if I was able to do it, you will be able to do it also.

And here we got the final result

Testing

The idea was to use it during the 3Y0J expedition to bouvet island. Sadly i wasn't able to receive them so it was pointless to call them, also there where a huge pileup with much more power and better antennas than me.

In any case the cable worked fine, I have to manually adjust the frecuency at the transceiver since I don't have cat control but it wasn't a problem at all, just a sigly inconvenience.

This cable allowed me to do my first qso ever in ft8 with IZ2OAR around 2900 km away from me. Not bad for the really bad and simple antenna that i was using at the moment.