Arduino Radio Control

Arduino Radio control

Work on progress

This project is to enable the use of existing commercial radio such as a Maxtrac, GM300, or GE MVS, among others, to become a programmable radio with an Ardunio. This means that you will no longer need special programming cables or software to program a radio, whether it be for home, mobile, remote-base, or repeater use.

The reason why I am doing this is to enable free tuning of the radio without the need to program the radio using normal computer programming methods, ie, a cable, and a special program that is hard to come by, as well as must run this program on older hardware

Given that Arduinos can be programmed from just about anything, this enabled on the fly on at least, on site programming of the radio. I am working towards enabling the use of these radios, and a couple others to be controlled by repeater controllers, and allstarlink nodes using kenwood data command set. Or whatever it is.

Boiled down, this will enable good, inexpensive priced commercial radios to continue life; anyone who knows how to solder and program an Arduino can now use a commercial for a repeater VHF/UHF remote base, Allstarlink, IRLP, Echostink node radio, scanner, whatever.

With the significantly better RX fronts ends on these radios, cleaner TX, these will significantly outperform any chinese radio attached to any RoIP node.

The first iteration, the Arduino code will contain the frequency programming. During the maturing of the code, more features will be added such as adding a LCD display to see items such as frequency, shift (if any), PL/DPL (if any), as well as the ability to have a VFO and memory mode. Saving frequencies into memory mode is also in the works.

Sources will eventually be provided as they are found.

As of 20 Jan 2018, the status of this project is Maxtrac and GE MVS radios have been successfully able to tune any frequency within the radio's VCO range, and receiving a signal.