Radio/Kenwood/TS570S

Kenwood All-Mode Multi-Bander TS-570S radio:

TS-570 has a straight-through female 9-pin RS232 to female RS232 cable [1].

Manual

The following information is from the TS-570S manual.

Serial Port (Hardware)

Radio Serial Port Photo

There is an RS-232 serial port on the back of the radio, pictured below:

Radio Serial Port Pinout

The radio's manual gives the pinout for this port, and some information on how to communicate with the radio using the serial connection:

Here is a table with information about which pins go where, and the function of each pin. There are basically five pins used:

• Two pins are TX/RX pins for transferring data between the computer and the radio.
• Two pins are on/off switches for the TX/RX functionality (i.e., these have to be supplied with voltage for the radio and the computer to be able to transmit signals back and forth).
• One pin is a ground pin.

Computer Serial Port

I am connecting to the Kenwood radio's serial port using a MacBook Pro. I used a USB to RS-232 cable. Unfortunately, it was a USB to male RS232, and the radio also had a male RS232 connection in the back, so I used some tiny female-female wires to connect each of the individual pins:

On the MacBook, I will be using Python together with the pyserial library [2] to send serial commands out and over the wire.

Serial Communication (Software)

The pyserial library can be used to communicate with devices using a serial port/protocol. The pyserial library is available on Github: https://github.com/pyserial/pyserial

Serial Command Format

The Kenwood TS-570S manual details the pinout of the serial cable, and what hardware connections need to be made. But it also covers the specifics of how to send commands from a computer to the radio. The commands are classified as follows:

• Computer control commands
  • Input command (input to the transceiver)
    • Set command (sets particular condition)
    • Read command (reads an answer)
  • Output command (from the transceiver)
    • Answer command (transmits a condition)

Command syntax is as follows:

FA     00007000000   ;
^^     ^^^^^^^^^^   ^^
                    Terminator
       Parameters
Alphabetical command

For example, the following is a Set command:

FA00007000000;

The prefix FA will set the frequency (F) of variable frequency oscillator A (VFO A) to 7 MHz.

Likewise, the following is a corresponding Get (or Answer) command, asking for the frequency of VFO A:

FA;

When this command is sent, the radio will return the following:

FA00007000000;

This indicates that the frequency of VFO A is set to 7 MHz.

Alphabetical Commands

The following is a table of alphabetical commands given in the appendix of the TS-570S user manual:

A good "Hello World" command is the ID command, which returns the model number of the radio. I'll be using this to demonstrate basic serial communication with the TS-570S.

Pyserial Library

To install pyserial:

$ pip install pyserial

Now you can import pyserial by adding import serial to your Python code.

A basic tutorial is here: http://www.zilogic.com/blog/tutorial-pyserial.html

The next step is to connect to the serial device by creating a Serial object.

Finding the USB to Serial Device

To do this, we need to use syntax like ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUSB0'). To do that, we need to know what file in /dev/ corresponds to our USB-RS232 adapter.

I started by unplugging the USB-RS232 cable from the laptop's USB port, shutting down the radio, and running the command /bin/ls -1 /dev/ > /tmp/noradio.

Next, I plugged the USB-RS232 cable into the laptop's USB port, turned on the radio, and ran the command /bin/ls -1 /dev/ > /tmp/withradio.

I then looked for any devices that showed up when I plugged in the USB-RS232 cable into the USB port:

$ vim -d /tmp/noradio /tmp/withradio

No luck - there were no devices that showed up when I plugged in the serial cable.

Installing Drivers

My next step was to try installing a driver for the USB-RS232 cable from the manufacturer (in this case, CableMatters). Their drivers page [3] provided a link to a Mac driver. Specifically, the page with the driver listed it as "Smart I/O > USB to UART/Serial/Printer > PL2303 Mac OS X Driver Download".

I downloaded version 1.6.0, which was a zipped up pkg file. It was only 94 KB, but required a restart. oooookay, annoying driver software, let's reboot.

Finding the USB to Serial Device Redux

After installing the driver, trying again.

Unplug the USB-RS232 cable, power off the radio, and list all device files:

$ /bin/ls -1 /dev/ > /tmp/noradio

Power on the radio, plug in the USB cable, and list all device files again:

$ /bin/ls -1 /dev/ > /tmp/withradio

Now look for devices that showed up when the radio was turned on and plugged in:

$ vim -d /tmp/noradio /tmp/withradio

BINGO!!! We have our USB serial device showing up when we plug in the USB-RS232 device. Two device files show up when the USB-RS232 cable is plugged in:

/dev/cu.usbserial
/dev/tty.usbserial

Twisted Library

The Twisted library also allows for asyncronous communication with a serial device. Twisted is an event-driven Python library. Examples are provided with the Twisted documentation.

Serial MouseMan example: https://twistedmatrix.com/documents/16.2.0/_downloads/mouse.py

Serial NMEA GPS example: https://twistedmatrix.com/documents/16.2.0/_downloads/gpsfix.py

All examples: https://twistedmatrix.com/documents/16.2.0/core/examples/index.html

Links

Manual for the TS-570S transceiver: http://www.manualslib.com/manual/86121/Kenwood-Ts-570d-Ts-570s.html