A few months ago, I bought a Kenwood TS-520S. The Kenwood hybrid’s are beautiful radios, and the TS-520 is the first radio I was on the air with (on amateur HF bands) while I was in High School in the early 80’s. \u00a0So when I had an opportunity to pick one up locally, I jumped at it.<\/p>\n
I have had a great time playing around with it and ragchewing. It takes a bit more work than my K3 or TS-2000 (tuning, calibrating) but that’s the beauty – it’s like an older car with points, condensers, and a carburetor – takes some more tweaking, but you can fiddle with it easily. I replaced the HV caps, adjusted the calibrator, and cleaned the switches and pots, but that’s about it. It just works.<\/p>\n
I came across a site called Toddfun.com<\/a>\u00a0while doing some TS-520 searches, and found a series of very well documented posts<\/a> (with in depth videos) about\u00a0\u00a0building a Kenwood DG-5 type display for the TS-520. \u00a0The Kenwood DG-5 was an optional digital display for the TS-520\/820, and on the used market they go for more than I paid for the radio! \u00a0He was using the Arduino platform, something I have been using for a few years here. \u00a0I thought, “I can do this!”, but instead of a display, I wanted to have it talk to my computer so my logging program (DXLab<\/a>) could read the frequency of the radio.<\/p>\n There’s lots I could do better, and the Mega 328 isn’t the best platform to be doing frequency counting, updating a display, and servicing a serial port at the same time. \u00a0The frequency counter needs the limited internal timers on the 328 which limits use of I2C, SPI, and software serial libraries as far as I can see. \u00a0Nevertheless, getting the TS-520 to talk to my computer is what I set out to do, and it works beautifully!<\/p>\n A quick and dirty demo of it:<\/p>\n