VK4DX was active from Russell Island – OC137 from 23 – 26 September 2021 signing as VK4DX/P

Activity was mostly CW as well as some FT8 on 40-10m bands.

Update 7 Nov 2021 – all direct QSL cards have been sent today. As postal services worldwide have been experiencing severe delays, please note that it may take up to 6 weeks for the card to arrive.

QSL information available here.

Read a related article – 5 Jan 2022 – Yaesu FTDX10 deep-dive review

In early April 2021 Yaesu issued a new firmware version 1.05 to address a few issues in V 1.04. This update turned out to be quite a disaster for some hams causing their radio all sorts of problems. Yaesu were quick to address this and released version 1.06 a few days later.

It turns out that the version 1.06 is more of a downgrade than upgrade over 1.04, and this is why.

Band selection

In V1.04 you could change the band by pressing the BAND key and selecting the band on the touch panel. You could also press the BAND key, turn the MPVD ring (multi purpose VFO outer dial) to the desired band then press the FUNC knob and your radio changes the band. Both of these functions still work in V1.06.

However, in V1.04 you could press the BAND key, turn the MPVD ring to the desired band and after 2 seconds the radio changes the band. This has been removed in V1.06.

Interestingly the same functionality for MODE selection has survived the cull and is still available in V1.06.

(Update: the MPVD band change functionality has been restored in V1.08 in May 2021)

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I was active as AX4DX on 25 April 2021. All QSLs for this operation are on their way to the QSL bureau.