ELAD FDM DUO & WSJT FT8

FTDI VIRTUAL COM PORT DRIVER

After sorting out a Portable FT8 Station yesterday, using my Yaesu FT-818ND, I decided to set it up on the ELAD FDM DUO too. Should be straightforward enough. The ELAD was already setup in the shack (firmware all up to date) and was connected to the PC with 3 USB Leads (yes, three - that's what it takes). The ELAD software was running perfectly well and there were no issues with CAT control between the PC and radio. Good start!

I installed the latest WSJT software (V2.1.2 at the time of writing) and went to the Settings to configure it. The ELAD FDM DUO is there in the list of radios so it was happy days so far. But no, the software could not find the radio. The only thing listed in the SERIAL PORT section was COM1, so I looked in the Device Manager and saw that there was no virtual serial port. The manual recommends downloading the driver from the FTDI website and so I downloaded and installed it.

Sadly, the virtual serial driver did not appear in the Device Manager and I farted about for a long time trying all sorts of things. I installed, re-installed, rebooted and rebooted again and again, powering down the radio each time.


After hours of messing around trying to find the reason why the Virtual USB Serial Port wouldn't appear, I removed the CAT-USB CABLE from the back of the machine and reinserted it. BOOM! It worked. SOOOOOOO ANNOYING!!!

So in case anyone else suffers the same fate, here's some Google Search Engine expressions, so that hopefully someone will find this post and save hours of frustration...

"FTDI Drivers now showing in device manager", "USB Serial Port not showing in device manager", "Virtual Com Port in device manager", "Alternatives to FTDI virtual com port driver".

Anyway, it's all working now...