Kenwood TH-F6A

I have a Kenwood TH-F6a triband handheld. I upgraded it with a Comet antenna when I bought it around 2007. It was my first ham radio purchase.

Programming

I realized I want to program the scanner with repeater frequencies etc. and what a pain it is to do by hand, so I bought an RS232 programming cable (eBay for $14 including shipping).

Programming by hand (no computer available)

RTFM

Programming with a computer

http://w4zt.com/mods/thf6/mods.html

When I use the Mac, I use my generic USB-RS232 cable which shows up in Windows as a Prolific 2303 on COM7. (*Double check the Device Manager serial port to see if it's COM7 today.)

Don't forget the radio has to be set up to talk to the computer over the SP/MIC jack. By default it's set to talk to a Speaker/Mic. (Who would have thought.) User manual page 45.

1. Push MNU
2. Turn knob to select SP/MIC menu
3. Select PC
4. Push MNU to save or PTT to cancel

Set back to SP/MIC when done if you have a speaker/mic like I do.

Grig + hamlib

I just fired up grig ("apt-get install grig") for the first time. I am running on a Parallels VM called "Xubuntu Cinnamon" in my MacBookPro, Plover.

The command I used was: grig -m 219 -r /dev/ttyUSB0 In the radio I had to switch (MNU button) the setting from SP/Mic to PC to get it to use the SP/Mic jacks as a serial port.

I can see some settings but grig does not seem to do much.

At least I know the serial port is working and that Windows 7 + Kenwood MCP program is faulty. I can tune the radio. Have not been able to make it do anything useful.

Kenwood's software

Windows program is downloadable from http://www.kenwood.com/i/products/info/amateur/software_download.html

"Memory Control Program MCP-F6/F7 Version 1.01" Still current as of Sept 2015

Documentation

This is a very interesting page on the TH-F6A; including several manuals and full schematics. http://www.hampedia.net/kenwood/th-f6a.php

Here are another ham's notes: http://www.brenemanlabs.com/Thf6a.htm