What is the ICOM Reader?

The HamPod ICOM Reader has been specifically designed to work with several ICOM transceivers to provide a great deal of capability and accessibility to these radios. With the ICOM Reader, you will have convenient quick access to the most commonly used functions provided by your ICOM model and use your transceiver with a high degree of capability. All without the need for a connected station computer or help from a fellow ham or long-suffering partner!

There are several options that determine how the ICOM Reader performs and interacts with your transceiver and all options are stored in EEPROM and retain their settings when powered off. The ICOM reader can be set to automatically report some changes as you operate your transceiver or can be configured to be silent and only report information when requested by you with a key press on the ICOM Readers 16 button keypad. The keypad is used to configure the ICOM Reader and to request information from the ICOM transceiver as well as to perform direct frequency entry more quickly and efficiently, especially on those small models without a keypad. The ICOM Reader also allows easy entry of several control settings such as PL/CTCSS/DTCS tones and options, Mode, mic gain, power level, keyer speed, compression, and more if your model supports those functions. Currrently there is support for IC-703/Plus, IC-706MkII, IC-718, IC-746/Pro, IC-756/Pro/ProII/ProIII, IC-775, IC-7000, IC-7200, IC-7400, IC-7410,IC-7851, and IC-9100. Now with support for the IC-7100, IC-7300, and new IC-7610 touch screen radio's. Just added DStar support for the IC-7100 and IC-9100! More models and functionality can be added as requested. Please note that all ICOM models do not support full functionality via the CI-V port so not every command will work with specific ICOM models and some such as the original 756 and 775 are quite limited.

The ICOM Reader is supplied with a 6 foot serial cable, 9 volt DC wall power supply and a null modem cable adapter to connect to a PC for flash updrades. You will need to provide your own CI-V interface cable or we can provide one as an option. Please download and read through the manual from the link below for more details and see just how much the HamPod ICOM Reader does for ICOM accessibility.

HamPod ICOM Reader Hardware Description

The rear of the HamPod ICOM Reader has two male DB9 serial ports and a DC power jack. The firmware is upgradable in the field through one of these ports by connecting to a computer to flash the firmware in the HamPod when an upgrade is available. With the ICOM Reader, you can connect two ICOM transceivers or optionally, connect one ICOM and a different piece of supported equipment to the serial ports and switch between them by using the keypad. The power jack accepts 9 to 15 volts dc and has a positive center pin and can be powered with the supplied wall wart or connected to your 12 volt DC shack power distribution system. There is a 16 button keypad on the top of the unit on the left side and the speaker grill is on the right. New versions of the HamPod have a 3.5mm headphone jack on the right side. The dimensions are 5.3" x 4.0" x 1.5" plus about 3/8" of additional height for the keypad

Downloads:
Important Update Note!

As of 02/01/2019, the HamPod is now shipping with a new version of the Microchip CPU processor which has twice the flash memory available for firmware. This is needed to accommodate some combinations of firmware builds that require the extra memory space. When downloading firmware from these pages, you need to be sure to get the version for the processor chip currently in your HamPod. Firmware versions that starts with v1.xx is for the older CPU while v2.xx if for the new CPU. Check the manual for your HamPod to see how to access the version number. On most radio firmware, you can do this by attempting to send a frequency of 777 to the radio.

Contact: Info at HAMPod.com