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Tag: kenwood

  • HCRA’s 250 Raffle – Win A Kenwood TS-590SG

    Win A Kenwood TS-590SG

    ts-590sgraffle

    Tickets Just $10 EA

     

    It’s that time for the Hampden County Radio Associations (HCRA) annual raffle. This year the board of directors wanted to raffle off a 100w base station transceiver. The Kenwood TS-590SG ($1700 Retail) was the perfect choice because it’s a very excellent radio packed with features that rival radios that cost much more. It’s an HF-6M 100W with 32bit DSP that has excellent receiver according to sherwood engineering. Some of the features include

    • Auto Tuner
    • On Screen CW decoding
    • HF and 6M Antenna Jacks
    • Programmable Functions
    • 500hz / 2.7kHz  Roofing Filters
    • DSP AGC
    • USB Port
    • Noise Reduction
    • Down Conversion

    HCRA has printed 250 tickets. Due to the price of the item, HCRA has put a limit on the minimum amount of tickets that can be sold before the raffle is allowed to take place. If the minimum amount has been reached, the item will be raffled at the Mount Tom Amateur Repeater Association’s Ham Fest in 2016. We’re asking $10 for each ticket.

    Tickets will be available at HCRA meetings, VE Sessions at Holyoke Medical Center, Field Day, Selected area Hamfest/Fleamarkets and through the board of directors.

  • Kenwood IF-232C USB Replacement Interface

    For those of you with ye olde Kenwoods, this little rig control interface may be of some interest to you. It does what the Kenwood IF-232C does but only cost me about $25 and a little time for soldering.  I haven’t tested every aspect of it yet, but I know the VFO changes in both N1MM and Commander from the DXLab Suite.

    http://people.wallawalla.edu/~Rob.Frohne/SDR/USB%20Interface/IF-232%20USB%20Replacement.html

    A couple notes from my experience building it:

    Because the site in the tutorial was out of stock at the time, I purchased my board from here:
    http://www.karlssonrobotics.com/shop/breakout-board-for-ft232rl-usb-to-serial/

    Also, my board had a solder jumper with two connectors, so I just moved the solder bridge from the 3.3V pin to the 5V pin removing the need for the extra wire jumper in his design.  My board had different connections on the sides so I just connected wires to the connections indicated by the pinouts of the DIN-6 (RTS, CTS, RXD, TXD, GND).  These are clearly indicated on the underside of the board (my board at least).  Yours may vary here as well, so look before you leap.

    In addition, the mappings to the DIN-6 connector are as you’re looking into the radio, not as you’re looking into the connector. I discovered this the hard way and had to do some resoldering.

    One last note: FTDI released a successor for MPROG called FT_Prog which works perfectly fine for programming the chip for the inversions needed. Drivers are available on their site, but Windows 7 SP1 x64 pulled them down from Windows Update without a problem.

    There is also a utility on the FTDI site to remap COM ports if the chip ends up with a COM number greater than 8 (the max N1MM supports).

    73 and Happy New Year de K1MAZ