Control Code for TS-440S

[W4ZPS]

After years of procrastination I now have my TS-440S interfaced and ready for computer control. I am told by Kenwood that their codes are "proprietary". Yet, there is plenty of non-Kenwood software which uses the code.

Does anyone have a listing and "how to" for those of us who would like to write their own program?

Thanks

[W3LK]

<< . I am told by Kenwood that their codes are "proprietary".>>

That's interesting. All the control codes for my TS-570S(G) are right in the owner's manual.

73,

Lon - W3LK
Naugatuck, Connecticut

[N3OX]

Ham Radio Deluxe supports the TS-440S and has a listing of all the commands it uses.

I've saved the listing for the TS-440S and uploaded it to:

http://n3ox.net/files/TS-440S%20-%20Supported%20Commands.txt

I don't think I saved or copied anything wrong but you know, use at your own risk, whatever ;-)

73
Dan

[N3OX]

"That's interesting. All the control codes for my TS-570S(G) are right in the owner's manual. "

By the way, Lon ... it's an interesting thing.

"All" the codes for my Yaesu FT-857D are in the manual, according to the manual.

But Ham Radio Deluxe supports approximately five times then number of settings that the manual would have you believe were possible ;-)

Little bit of an exaggeration (there are nearly 100 lines in the Yaesu's HRD file analogous to what I posted here, and there are 17 opcodes in the manual, but some of the 17 got broken into multiple lines for things like setting the mode)

But the CAT command set does dozens of things that aren't in the manual.  Apparently, there's a lot of development work reverse engineering codes for radios that manufacturers don't bother publishing.  And it's not dangerous stupid stuff like internal settings; it's more like you can change the CW speed setting over the CAT port but the manual doesn't tell you how to do it!

It's funny what some manufacturers won't tell you.

It might be that a lot of those things are there for initial radio setup to the default settings, and a few of them do require you to be a little careful with repeated writes from what I understand, so maybe they just decided to omit those from the manual to keep people from hosing the rig by writing to the some EEPROM at 100Hz for a couple weeks.  

But proper use of those codes is not a bit more dangerous than using the rig normally.  And they're not all codes that write to settings that get stored in nonvolatile memory either... some are read codes, etc.

Pretty weird...

73
Dan

[AA6YQ]

re "It's funny what some manufacturers won't tell you."

Setting aside software-defined radios, pretty much the only transceivers with any significant number of undocumented commands are from the Yaesu 817/857/897 series. KA7OEI reverse engineered much of the 817's EEPROM memory as described in

http://www.ka7oei.com/ft817_meow.html

The 857 and 897 CAT systems are based on the 817 design.

The undocumented capabilities are achieved by reading and writing locations in EEPROM. There are two problems with using these commands:

1. EEPROMs have lifetime limits on the number of writes to each bit

2. a serial port glitch while sending a command could brick your transceiver

Other Yaesu transceivers have small undocumented capabilities, but this is a side effect of Yaesu's notoriously inaccurate and incomplete CAT documentation.

   73,

       Dave, 8P9RY

[KE4DRN]

Perhaps the people at kenwood thought you
were asking for source code instead of
rig control code ?

Lost in the translation?

73 james

[KC2DWQ]

AA6YQ said:
Setting aside software-defined radios, pretty much the only transceivers with any significant number of undocumented commands are from the Yaesu 817/857/897 series. KA7OEI reverse engineered much of the 817's EEPROM memory as described in

http://www.ka7oei.com/ft817_meow.html

The 857 and 897 CAT systems are based on the 817 design.



While it may be based on the 817, I am currently documenting the 897 eeprom.  The read command (0xBB) is the same and just as undocumented, however the placement of where certain bits are is different.  

For my perl script that dumps the eeprom, and the memory map that I am compiling you can go to http://www.0xdecafbad.com/?p=154 any suggestions, additions, etc would be gratefully accepted.

The process I am using, which is presumably what HRD, k7oei, and others have done is quite simple, although tedious.  You dump the prom and store it to a file, then make a change on the radio and dump it again.  Look for the sections that changed, and try to identify what those changes mean.  For the menu option changes it will likely be 1 byte (maybe 2) that changes.  If you see a bunch of changes that could be because it appears to write to the eeprom when you switch to certain menus (so it can remember where you were when you boot up again), or change the frequency or such.  This means that you have to filter those changes out.  Additionally many of the items appear to be bitmasks, so a good calculator that will switch between hex and binary is a good thing to have to make it easier to see which bits are changing so you can identify which applies to a given setting.