What is the Kenwood Reader?

The HamPod Kenwood Reader has been specifically designed to work with the TS-2000 and some additional commands have been added for the TS-590S and TS-590SG transceivers to provide a great deal of capability and accessibility to these radios. Much of the Kenwood serial protocol is similar across several of their models so most likely will work with others such as the TS-570 and TS-480. With the Kenwood Reader, you will have convenient quick access to the most commonly used functions provided by your Kenwood 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!This firmware is still in development but is mature with the currently implemented functions set to be a valuable asset to your shack. Guaranteed. You will find you can turn off the Kenwood speech synthesizer (not possible with TS-570) and be able to operate in peace without all the annoying chatter and use the HamPod to give you only the amount of feedback you require, and only when you want it

There are several options that determine how the Kenwood Reader performs and interacts with your transceiver and all options are stored in EEPROM and retain their settings when powered off. The Kenwood 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 Kenwood Readers 16 button keypad. The keypad is used to configure the Kenwood Reader and to request information from the Kenwood transceiver as well as to perform direct frequency entry more quickly and efficiently.

The Kenwood 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 upgrades. Please download and read through the manual from the link below for more details and see just how much the HamPod Kenwood Reader does for Kenwood accessibility.

HamPod Kenwood Reader Hardware Description

The rear of the HamPod Kenwood 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 Kenwood Reader, you can connect two Kenwood transceivers or optionally, connect one Kenwood 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 12 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. 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