Yaesu FT-857D and rigctl
Lately I've been testing my rig (Yaesu FT-857D) with rigctl, a command line utility that sends commands to your radio via serial cable. Here are some tips.
First of all, I'm not responsible for any damage deriving from this post. 
Examples posted here refer to Linux Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid), but they should work fine with latest Ubuntu versions.
The command line utility rigctl is available after installing libhamlib-utils package.
Connect your rig to your computer using the serial CAT cable. For Yaesu FT-857D, go to menu #019 and set CAT RATE value, for example 38400 bps.
Assuming that you are using /dev/ttyS0 device, it's handy to define a /dev/rig symlink to it:
Current user must be in dialout group.
Another useful setting is to define the following alias (only valid for Yaesu FT-857D):
-m option sets the target rig while -s sets our CAT rate speed. Now we can run the whole command by simply typing rc. Let's try some commands.
Read current frequency:
Set frequency to 14.076 MHz:
Set AM, FM, USB or LSB mode:
rc M FM 0
rc M USB 0
rc M LSB 0
Set digital mode (DIG):
Set repeater shift frequency (1.6 MHz):
Set repeater shift (+, - or disable):
rc R -
rc R 0
CTCSS tone setting (71.9, tenths of Hz):
The above only sets selection in menu #083 (TONE FREQ). To actually set the squelch use the following one:
There are similar command lines for DCS codes (use set_dcs_sql option).
Of course, you can combine different options in a single command line:
You can try different commands by yourself with your rig, if supported by libhamlib. Dump all of its capabilities on a file:
Now you're ready to put the above command lines on some scripts, using your favourite programming language.
I wrote some PHP lines in order to read my presets from a MySQL database and set my rig on the fly by clicking on a web page in my localhost. Sample code is available here, under a GNU/GPL license: feel free to modify or improve this software to fit your needs.
