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 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.

Links

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