Last month at Marzaglia ham flea market I’ve bought a CODAN 9360 radio without display. It comes just with some info about connectors pinout and nothing more. How to use it?
My modified codan
The seller told me the radio accept Kenwood CAT commands via the RS232 and that I can use it via Ham Radio Deluxe as TS-480 radio.
Connections
I’ve made the RS232 cable using a 3,5mm stereo jack and a DB9 female receptacle. The PC must be connected to a USB-rs232 adapter of proved quality because the radio use true rs232 signals not TTL-UART.
DB9 pin 5 — > jack ground pin 2 –> central jack ring pin 3 –> external jack ring (jack point)
illustration by IK2NUQ
Ham Radio Deluxe setting are Kenwood TS480 protocol 9600 bps.
I’ve insered a loudspeaker into the radio’s enclosure and a red light so I know if it’s powered or not.
Not the cleanest result but it works.
In the future I’ll totaly replace all the enclosure and made a custom case for this radio with standard front controls / display / exc… but at the moment I prefer to use it as my main BPSK/RTTY radio.
In order to interface it to my PC i’ve made a cable that connects audio in/out from the DB25 connector to a chinese usb stick audio card.
Now I have all the connection to operate it via HRD. It works just well, 100W output and I’ve made a lot of digital qso’s with it. The radio have some issues that made it just barely suitable for ham radio operation like some strange frequecy response of the ssb filter and is not too much optimized for plain standard voice audio qso’s. It best fit in digital operating condition also because the big heatsink could dissipate thermal power of long continue qso’s.
If you have a CODAN 9360 and want to modify it to use kenwood cat you can flash one of this firmware on a 128k parallel eprom and replace the original one, that is present into the radio’s PCB CPU section. I’m using the version 1.6.
I’ve discovered that Massimo IV3ZXF is the author of this firmware. The firmware binaries 1.4 and 1.6 are dumped from reading the ROM that I’ve bought with my CODAN. I’m publishing here this firmware in the hope that will be usefull for other people. All credits goes to Massimo IV3ZXF.
You need to flash an AMD AM28F010 Flash eeprom or equivalent with one of this firmware binaries:
I’m using Willem programmer from Sivava.com to do that. You can find one clone also on Aliexpress.
The eprom that must be replaced is located into the CPU & ROM enclosure on the logic board.
PLL and logic board. The enclosure on the top right is the CPU & ROM enclosure
The new eeprom goes here
The pin number 1 is marked with a dot on the eeprom IC body and also with a pink dot into my last image. Please insert the IC into the right position. The photo show the eeprom position with the IC removed by me but you’ll find another in that place; that is the original IC with original firmware. Please keep it, don’t overwrite it! That IC is your insurrance to don’t trow away the radio if the new firmware for some reason doesn’t work.
This is the RF IF demodulators/modulator/filters board. Nothing to do here but is nice to take a look
Here a collection of various mods and info sent me by IK2NUQ Luca CODAN
This mod solve the trouble with NJ8822 equiped CODAN’s that block during quick frequency changes CODAN NJ8822 MOD