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

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.

Links

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