Xiegu G90, FT8, CE-19, WSJT-X, & FLRig Troubleshooting

UPDATE: I’ve made a video showing this if that format is more palatable for whoever needs it.

Putting this out to hopefully reach out and help someone else so they don’t go through the same crazy troubleshooting I did. To get the main problem out of the way, if your symptoms are:

1. You can see signals being received on the G90 waterfall
2. You can see your S-meter going up in FLRig
3. You cannot see the signals in WSJT-X waterfall and therefore nothing is being decoded.

You need to double check the mode you are running. In newer versions of the G90 firmware your mode need to be U-D (for USB) or L-D (for LSB) depending on your band. My issue for a few days has been that my G90 is running fairly new firmware so the documentation isn’t there yet. Older versions of the firmware use USB or LSB for SSB voice and FT8/FT4 but now there is a separate mode for digital.

Now that I’ve talked about the fix I’ll show my setup. I’m still working on antenna placement and configuration but as far as radio set up, I believe it’s pretty dialed in. I have a custom Y-cable going to a Sabrent USB audio adapter to my laptop.

The other side of that cable goes to my CE-19 adapter. This connects to the G90 with the 8-pin mini-Din. From the G90 cat connection on the head unit a Xiegu data cable to my laptop. So 2 USB connections to the laptop.

From there it’s mostly on the computer. I set the rig up in FL Rig and set up WSJT-X to point to FL Rig, set the Audio in and out in WSJT-X to point to the Sabrent adapter. When selecting your band in WSJT-X, you radio will automatically change to the correct frequency but as discussed earlier, it will set the G90 to either USB or LSB. You will need to change the mode appropriately to U-D or L-D. If all goes well your screen will look something like this!