Although it might sound like a cliché, the component shortage made me to return to one nice and long adjourned project – the KRT2 radio adapter. The motivation for this one is obvious: since we were forced to exchange our perfectly working radios for another ones supporting the 8.33kHz channel spacing it was literally a pain to store anything in the stations’ memory. Every spring the same situation occurred in all hangars around the universe where infelicitous pilots were attempting to update the for some reason ever-changing frequencies into the by-the-devil-himself designed KRT2 radios. And then the rest of the season everyone refused to make any further amendments as the frustration is simply tremendous. Something had to be done! B-)
Luckily, the author(s) of the KRT2 radio let the option to upload frequencies from something called “KRT2 Manager WinXP” open, hence there is a chance for us to flash the channel configurations from outside – a “third party” app and not to suffer so badly anymore. The application is called KRT2 Bluetooth and thanks to a friend with an android developer account is available right from the PLAY store.
The adapter itself is a module that belongs between the radio and the connector which is already there. No sophisticated installation is required – you just smoothly plug it in and secure both sides with compatible latches.
After powering-up the radio, you pair your android phone with the bluetooth adapter, open up the app, configure your personal list of frequencies, select the appropriate bluetooth device and upload your configuration into the radio. Done. Finished.
Order of the stations in the list can be changed by dragging rows in the frequency-list table up and down. Multiple lists are beneficial especially when traveling around competitions frequently or friends desire to have a different set of frequencies. Complete lists can be exported into a csv file using the share button while import needs to be done by sending the file into the application (“Send to */*”).
I like to say one KRT2 Bluetooth module shall be present in every club so all the radios could be set-up easily at the beginning of the season and no hassle is necessary later on. I made several of these very handy units and you can get them right now! Just visit the Choose and Buy section 🙂