I’ve decided to look at the FT-817 backend tonight. There are some TODOs concerning the check of the TX level readings. I couldn’t do them before because I had only batteries to power the FT-817, thus tuning with 5W wasn’t really possible.
Now, there are two ways to read the TX power. The official way using command 0xF7, which reads the power level regardless of the TX meter setting. The other possibility is to use the undocumented command 0xBD, which will read all TX meter levels at once. This command, however, is way to close to 0xBE, which resets the 817 to factory defaults. Therefore, we keep the official one in safe mode.
The conclusion is that the tx power level code in the FT-817 backend is all right. Grig, on the other had, does not receive the value from the backend. it doesn’t even trigger the ft817_get_pometer_level function.