Why It Doesn’t Work
The Yaesu FT-710 HF transceiver contains a non-standard and possibly emulated CM-108 USB audio interface that allows working digital modes without any need for an external sound card. Simply plug the USB into your PC of choice and start going. Unfortunately, on Linux, some required parameters aren’t passed through to the sound system which cause issues with using it.
The primary issue is that PipeWire, the modern (as of 2025) default audio system on Linux distributions, defaults to a sample rate of 48000 Hz, which exceeds the capabilities of the built-in audio of the FT-710 at 44100 KHz. When this happens, the USB Audio Device starts disappearing and reappearing rapidly in Gnome Control Panel until you close any programs attempting to use it. I haven’t tested this, but the same should occur in KDE or any other desktop environment.
Let’s Fix It
The easiest fix is to force the global sample rate of the entire PipeWire system to 44100 Hz by entering the following in a command line:
# pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.force-rate 44100There is likely a much more complicated fix for the individual device so that every sound device on the system doesn’t have to be set down to 44100 which involves WirePlumber and it’s associated configuration files.
https://pipewire.pages.freedesktop.org/wireplumber/daemon/configuration/alsa.html
Conclusion
Do I know why it’s this difficult? No. Hopefully this can be resolved in the desktop environment UI in the future.
References
Pipewire: how to set the audio sample rate for a device like a microphone
Reddit: FT-710 with FT8 in Linux (Debian/testing) – finally solved