Cloning the Wouxun KG-UVD1P

Figured I’d share this trick. The KG-UVD1P dual-band handheld produced by Wouxun supports a feature whereby all settings and memory channels can be transferred to a second handheld using a wire clone cable.

Unfortunately, nowhere describes the wiring of the cloning cable… well… none that I have seen. The Wouxun handhelds use the same wiring standards as Kenwood radios, so same headset pinouts, same PC interface cable schematics. They use 3.3V TTL signalling — just a level shifter is needed for RS232 communications to a host computer.

For those who are interested, this is the pinout for the headset connector (taken from the Kenwood TH-F7E handbook):

–	“Ear” (2.5mm)	“Mic” (3.5mm)
Tip	Speaker	3.3V reference
Ring	Remote	Microphone
Sleeve	0V	PTT

I’m not sure if the “Remote” is actually used on Wouxuns… on the Kenwood handheld, this is where the three programmable buttons connect, each one via a series resistor in parallel (PF1 is 3.9k, PF2 is 10k and PF3 is 27k) — there is also a lock switch which shorts this pin to 0V. The Microphone connection provides a bias for electret microphones, this may be blocked by a 10pF capacitor.

To hook the handheld up to a computer for programming, one needs a different cable. The connections into the handheld are via the same two connectors, but now the signals are different:

–	“Ear” (2.5mm)	“Mic” (3.5mm)
Tip	N/C	N/C
Ring	RXD	N/C
Sleeve	0V	TXD

A level shifter is needed before the port is RS-232 compatible. In this pinout though, lies the secret to cloning the KG-UVD1P. The cloning cable simply connects the RXD to the TXD on the other radio, and 0V to 0V. No level shifter is necessary since both sides of the cable use the same logic. I constructed a cloning cable using two 2.5mm and two 3.5mm stereo phono plugs, just hooking the 0V lines together, and ensuring RXD at one end, hooks to TXD at the other.

As for the actual procedure, the handbook I found, took a bit of re-reading. The procedure is thus:

1. Turn BOTH radios OFF
2. Plug in your cloning cable to both radios
3. Power on the destination radio, it powers up as normal.
4. Power on the source radio with the MONI button held in (this is the lower one on the left hand side). “COPING” is displayed.

During the process, the red transmit LED will blink on the source radio, while the destination’s green receive LED blinks. Eventually both radios will reset — you will see the first radio returns to where it was before it was powered off, the second radio will also display the same screen content, and have the same settings.

Tags: amateur-radio