Wiring in a CTCSS or PL tone board into an older radio

[dewdude]

I had/have an old Kenwood TR-7850 (or similar) 2m monobander that came out in an era where CTCSS was rarely used...so it was an add-on option. I had a mixed bag of instructions including the Norcom sheet, the ComSpec instructions, as well as the schematic for the radio which showed a circuit for the PL board. I wound up getting more from a description of the wires on the board and reverse engineering with the schematic...I also had a plug available to solder some pins on. I wound up tying it's enable line to the tone-enable from the rig; though since it used a matrix-diode to set up to three tones...I didn't bother trying to take the dip switches off and hack that together. For a while I wanted to get one of the slightly later Kenwood rigs since they did PL tone selection via serial programming...and the chip they used on the Norcomm board has support for that built in.

I bought a good HT and 50 watt VHF/UHF linear and use that if I ever want to VHF in the shack.