[Todd Harrison] really has our number. Like him, we don’t want to spend money when we don’t have to, and hacking our own solutions is a lot more fun anyway. This time around he’s helping out a friend who is a ham radio enthusiast. The friend’s radio didn’t come with a frequency display, and buying the add-on would cost more than the radio did. So [Todd] has set out to build an Arduino frequency counter for a Kenwood TS-520S HF ham radio.
This post (and the video found after the break) doesn’t cover the entire project. It’s rather involved just to make sure that [Todd's] initial idea is viable so he spends about 35 minutes explaining the problem, then measuring the radio outputs and testing to see that the Arduino can read them accurately. Because the radio has a very large range of operation, [Todd] will need to add external component to facilitate this. That extra circuit design will be the topic of the next project segment.
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Huh, I was just beginning to look into designing a frequency counter, but using 7400 series logic and an AVR.
This is amazing! I actually have a TS-520SE that I bought as a teenager back in 1979 that I still have and I always wanted an external frequency display like the more expensive rigs at the time. I might just have to dust off my transceiver and give this one a shot.
Thanks Todd!
Fantastic hack, but…
You can get cheap frequency counters online for just a few bucks. Even my old Heath-Zenith SM-2420 (0-500 MHz) only cost me $40 at a ham radio flea market.
@DainBramage1991 Your counter, however, only reads your TX output freq. This project he’s working on is a real-time readout for RX & TX, since it’s reading all 3 freqs and calculating the actual operation freq from that. A “digital dial”, basically.