I very recently purchased the Kenwood DB9 cable set and a RS-232 Digirig to use with my Kenwood TS-2000, and I am having some issues.
MSHV will show signals on the waterfall, and decode them, as normal, and will also activate the PTT when set to the “TS-2000” configuration, but will not TX audio.
WSJT-X does not show audio on the waterfall (even with the same settings from MSHV), and, when set to “TS-2000” with RTS PTT, will PTT but will not TX audio from the digirig.
flrig will connect and CAT control works, as well as PTT, but using it for rig control with MSHV or WSJT-X, it will not send audio. I have tried both cat command for PTT and RTS for PTT with no success.
fldigi will not send audio when configured for hamlib control, or with flrig being used for control. It also does not show any audio on the waterfall.
The weirdest thing though, is when I plug a PC headset into the “Audio” port on the Digirig and test each channel it doesn’t seem like it is working correctly. With left channel at 100% and right channel at 0% I get loud audio from the right (not the left) speaker, and low audio from the left speaker. When I have the left channel at 0% and the right channel at 100% I get no audio at all.
The headphone test will only give audio on the right side. The reason for that is Digirig’s audio socket is not normally intended for use with the stereo headphones and the only audio output line happens to line up with the right side. The audio on the right side of the headphones comes from the left channel of the audio codec. Depending on the Digirig model, the right channel of the code is unconnected (Digirig Mobile) or used for VOX/Tone PTT (Digirig DR-891, Digirig Lite, PTT Cable).
Now back to the issue at hand:
With the audio from Digirig confirmed, let’s look into cables connections. Please use continuity tester to confirm that all the lines are connected. The view on 13 pin connector will be mirrored when accessing from the pins side.
I verified the cable, and found no issues, thankfully.
Good to know about the Audio TRRS. I thought it was a shot in the dark. Glad to know it’s not something on my end there.
I did figure out a solution, from a forum post buried on the web from long ago, and it fixed my issue.
It seems the issue was that menu option 50F, Data Transfer Speed: External TNC, needs to be set to 1200bps and menu option 55, Packet Communication Mode, needs to be set to OFF, for the radio to unmute the audio on pin 11. Doing those two things resolved the issue of no audio on TX when using the Digirig.
This was horribly confusing, and took quite a while to troubleshoot. It may be beneficial to others, so I am hoping that with this post, this SNAFU can be avoided in the future.
I am running flrig, and MSHV, but this fix should work aside from those programs, with any TS-2000 and the RS-232 Digirig with the Kenwood DB9/ACC 8-pin cables.
