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PY2BIL > TECH 04.05.19 18:11l 31 Lines 3146 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 2641_PY2BIL
Read: GUEST
Subj: Bringing a Kantronics KPC3P back to life
Path: IW8PGT<HB9ON<IW2OHX<IR1UAW<F1OYP<ON0AR<GB7CIP<ZS0MEE<ZL2BAU<GB7YEW<
PY2BIL
Sent: 190504/1604Z 2641@PY2BIL.SP.BRA.SOAM LinBPQ6.0.18
Bringing a Kantronics KPC3P back to life
I had recently the opportunity to pick up a barely used Kantronics KPC3P TNC. This was a first one to me so I was not sure if I could actually make it run with modern equipment and operating systems. As a Plus model, I knew it was from late last century and it showed this by presenting a DB9 and a DB25 connector on the back. I took the dip anyways and started to experiment with it.
First thing was to get an USB-DB25 serial cable adapter, which by chance I had laying around in my shack. It was one of those chinese ones with blueish transparent connectors and a DB9-DB25 adapter on it. I opened the Device Manager on my Win10 machine to identify the COM port it was getting once I plugged it in and checked the baud rate setting, which by default was 9600.
At this point I had no idea what the settings of the TNC where, so I just plugged it in and opened my trusty Tera-Term terminal and pointerd it to COM3 with 9600 bauds, 8 data bits, no parity and one stop bit and none under Flow Control. As expected, I didn't get much back, besides two gibberish characters. At least I knew the cable was not totally bad and I played around with different baud rates to see if I could find the right one. No luck.
At this point I decided to dive into the thick 295 pages manual that fortunately came in the box and I went straight to the resetting chapter to find out how the correct procedure was. It turned out to be pretty simple. With the unit powered down I located the hard reset jumper (J11) clearly labeled on the PCB near the power socket and and placed it on both pins.
According to instructions I made sure the baud rate on my serial port was on 1200 baud and then I turned the unit on...
Surprise surprise, text started to show up on the terminal!
CHECKSUM OK
RAM OK
128K BYTES
NO CLOCK
REPLACE TEST JUMPER
There was also some text referring to replacing the depleated 5v Lithium battery, which I did later too. I turned power off and returned the jumper to one pin only (the default position)
Turning it back on, it showed the message 'PRESS (*) TO SET BAUD RATE' and then some gibberish and a prompt for my callsing, which I typed in.
It was still at 1200 but I wanted to set the baud rate to 9600 and when I typed the command 'A 9600' I got an error 'Command not available in NEWUSER'. I found out that to get out of NEWUSER mode, I had to enter 'intface terminal' at the command prompt and that put me in the more powerfull terminal mode.
At this point everything seemed to work as expected and I only chagend the date and time to start to operate with it. I was afraid the device would present a Y2K bug (remeber that?) when I saw that the command for setting the date was 'DA yymmddhhmm', but it went well after I enterd 'DA 1905041033' and with the DA command it showed 05/04/2019 10:33:03 afterwards.
So now I'm good to go, it was really easy once I spent the time looking things up in the manual and in case you don't have the it anymore, Kantronics still has a PDF copy that you could download for free.
Rebuilding the Packet infrastructure in Sao Paulo Brazil.
73 de PY2BIL
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