Controlling the Kenwood TS-450SAT through a Transceiver Interface: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

Version vom 28. Juni 2008, 23:52 Uhr

1 Project Objectives

The Kenwood TS-450SAT (no matter if with a Antenna Tuner or not, so also the TS-450S variant) both have a serial connector. It is located at the left side of the transceiver.

I decided to purchase the BX-120 interface from the German HAM magazine "Funkamateur", because

• it is a USB device
• it is supported by Linux
• it has a galvanic separation between the TRX and the computer circuitry
• it can control audio and the serial data link plus the key in a single box
• it can be used with a great number of transceivers
• there's a good documentation that comes with it

In short, it fulfilled all my requirements.

Being a Linux affiliate, I decided to try and steer my transceiver with Linux programs, notably and firstly with hamlib and secondly with all the applications basing on it. What is hamlib? Hamlib is a library that provides a consolidated interface to all sorts of transceivers. This leads to the comfortable situation that programmers for logging and other software won't need to think about transceiver control any more, but they can just link their software against the hamlib library and support over 1000 transceiver types at once.

The short term objective is to ensure the controllability of the TS-450SAT, the mid-term objective is to guarantee its operability through a low power steering device like the Cisco Linksys WRTSL54GS or the ASUS WL-500gP, and the longterm objective is the deployment of this architecture at DB0MHB.

2 Controllability of the TS-450SAT

It should be noted that the BX-120 requires some special settings: The USB2Serial chip allows for the inversion of the mark/space logic, which is indeed something the 450 needs. FTDI, the producer of the USB2Serial chip provides a configuration program called "MPROG", which can be downloaded from here:

• http://www.ftdichip.com/Resources/Utilities/MProg3.0_Setup.exe

Either you strictly follow the configuration instructions in the documentation from http://www.box73.de/catalog/pdf/BX-120.pdf or you simply download the settings file from the CDROM that comes with the BX-120. You can also download it from this site.

Then, as a next step, you should strictly stick to the cabling plan as given in the file at http://www.box73.de/catalog/pdf/BX-120.pdf You need a DIN-6 and a DIN-13 plug, and for the key you need a 6.3mm stereo or mono plug. Consider the following image, taken from the PDF I'm quoting all the time: