For those of you with ye olde Kenwoods, this little rig control interface may be of some interest to you. It does what the Kenwood IF-232C does but only cost me about $25 and a little time for soldering. I haven’t tested every aspect of it yet, but I know the VFO changes in both N1MM and Commander from the DXLab Suite.

http://people.wallawalla.edu/~Rob.Frohne/SDR/USB%20Interface/IF-232%20USB%20Replacement.html

A couple notes from my experience building it:

Because the site in the tutorial was out of stock at the time, I purchased my board from here:

http://www.karlssonrobotics.com/shop/breakout-board-for-ft232rl-usb-to-serial/

Also, my board had a solder jumper with two connectors, so I just moved the solder bridge from the 3.3V pin to the 5V pin removing the need for the extra wire jumper in his design. My board had different connections on the sides so I just connected wires to the connections indicated by the pinouts of the DIN-6 (RTS, CTS, RXD, TXD, GND). These are clearly indicated on the underside of the board (my board at least). Yours may vary here as well, so look before you leap.

In addition, the mappings to the DIN-6 connector are as you’re looking into the radio, not as you’re looking into the connector. I discovered this the hard way and had to do some resoldering.

One last note: FTDI released a successor for MPROG called FT_Prog which works perfectly fine for programming the chip for the inversions needed. Drivers are available on their site, but Windows 7 SP1 x64 pulled them down from Windows Update without a problem.

There is also a utility on the FTDI site to remap COM ports if the chip ends up with a COM number greater than 8 (the max N1MM supports).

73 and Happy New Year de K1MAZ