FT-450D microphone cable

This is one of those situations where I thought I had been smart and frugal.  Some time ago I had bought this cable on Ebay:

blue RJ-45 to 9 pin D cable from Ebay on the FT-450d manual

 

It has a male 9 pin D connector on one end and an 8 pin RJ-45 crimp connector on the other end.  The idea was that surely since there were 8 wires going to the crimp connector that all 8 would appear on the 9 pin D connector.

Nope.

Only 7 of the 8 signals are present, the missing signal is the MIC GND which I suspect is needed.

What I was hoping to do was to use the cable as is and have a 9 pin female D connector on a metal box of some kind.  This would allow me to have jacks for multiple items like a foot-switch, 1/4 inch phone jack for a Shure 444 microphone, 3.5mm jack for a Koss headset.  Also there could be switches for the UP/FAST/DOWN  capability just like the Yaesu hand mic.

But I suspect I'll have to cut off the cable and add a short cable to a 3.5mm female jack and then a whole lot of heat shrink to keep stuff insulated.  And probably a 2nd 3.5mm jack would be needed for PTT.  But the other stuff like parallel jacks for different mics and momentary switches for the frequency control stuff is out.

I guess the sour grapes perspective would say that using the full cable would result in hum or feedback from the lack of shielding ?  :)

Another idea: cut the cable slightly longer than the idea above and feed it through a grommet into a metal box under the rig ?  Then all the wires could be broken out to various connectors and switches.

I've waited this long, maybe I'll give it more thought.  The hand microphones are sold on ebay, so are just the coiled hand microphone cables, those would also work.

We'll see.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm