N5FDL Amateur Radio

If there is a single radio feature that gets people in trouble more than Yaesu’s WIRES, I don’t know what it is.

WIRES is a proprietary Echolink-like system for connecting repeaters that relies on a single Touch Tone sent at the beginning of every transmission. While the Touch Tone is being transmitted and for a beat afterwards the mic is muted.

This results in a transmission where the first few words are cut off—and you may or may not actually hear the sure-giveaway Touch Tone. If someone has a Yaesu radio, you tell them to key-up and start counting, and the audio cuts in at two or three, then WIRES has been turned on by mistake.

This is a common enough error that most of the time I can diagnose and help get it fixed over-the-air. So can most long-time Yaesu customers. But, why should we have to?

WIRES seems to be used by precisely no one in the U.S.

Yaesu should remove WIRES from all future units and promise to sin no more.

Likewise with ARTS, a transponder system that theoretically will tell users if they are close enough (or too far away) to communicate simplex.

Fine enough, but it only works with other Yaesu radios and is obnoxious to non-users sharing the frequency.

Again, precisely no one seems to actually use ARTS and it, too, should be relegated to the scrap heap of good, but failed, ideas.

Or am I missing something?