Kenwood TS-450 / TS-450S

A 100-watt all-mode HF transceiver from the early 1990s that earned its keep for decades, and left a paperwork trail that makes it harder to pin down than it should be.

Overview

The TS-450 is a Kenwood HF transceiver, sold in the early 1990s and long out of production. Start with the name, because the sources never agree on one. Some material calls it the TS-450, others the TS-450S, and at least one classified listing describes a TS-450SAT with a built-in tuner. The available documentation never states outright whether the plain TS-450 and the TS-450S are the same chassis, so treat the names as related but not proven identical. The manual muddies things further. It covers the TS-450S and the TS-690S together in one book, and offers the TS-450S in two versions, with or without a built-in automatic antenna tuner.

What the radio does is clearer than what to call it. It's an all-mode HF transceiver rated at up to 100 watts of output in CW, FSK, SSB, and FM, and up to 40 watts in AM. That AM figure comes from a single source, so hedge it. Most operators will spend their time on sideband and CW anyway. The receiver is a triple-conversion design. The transceiver was built in Japan, and one eBay seller's listing estimates the production period as roughly 1991 to 1994. That's an estimate, not a documented range, and no primary source confirms exact start or end years.

Kenwood's own advertising-era materials don't survive in the research here, but the eham.net review page lists an MSRP of 1,639.00 with no currency or year attached. Take that number as a period reference point rather than a precise figure.

Key Features

100 Watts on CW, FSK, SSB, and FM

The headline number is the output power: up to 100 watts across CW, FSK, SSB, and FM. That's full legal-limit territory for most HF work. AM drops to a reported 40 watts, a single-source spec, so treat it as approximate. The transceiver covers the 160 through 10 meter bands, including the WARC bands. Published frequency-range figures disagree with each other. One source says 0.5 to 30 MHz, another says 1.8 to 30 MHz, and a third listing prints "10Hz to 1MHz," which is clearly a typo rather than a spec. Given the conflict, the safest way to describe what the radio tunes is 160 through 10 meters plus WARC.

Triple-Conversion Receiver

The receiver uses a triple-conversion superheterodyne design. That architecture was standard practice for serious HF gear of the period, and it's the foundation the radio's filtering options build on. Owners who wanted tighter selectivity than the stock filters provided went after the IF chain directly — one long-term owner reports installing Inrad filters in the 2.1 kHz and 2.4 kHz positions for SSB on the first and second IF, plus 400 Hz and 250 Hz filters for CW on the same IFs. That's a real upgrade path, and it's the kind of modification that keeps a 30-year-old transceiver competitive on a crowded band.

Built-In Speaker and External Speaker Jack

The TS-450S/690S manual confirms a built-in speaker, and it documents an EXT SP jack on the rear panel for an external speaker. Kenwood's guidance in the manual is permissive: any good 8-ohm permanent-magnet speaker will do. The radio doesn't demand a proprietary matching speaker. Kenwood did offer one anyway, the SP-23, which one source describes as compatible with the TS-450. That same source calls the SP-23 a "speaker microphone" with wideband frequency response, which is almost certainly a translation slip, since the manual documents the SP-23 elsewhere as an external speaker. Treat the "speaker microphone" description with suspicion.

Modes and Operating Flexibility

The mode lineup — CW, FSK, SSB, FM, and AM — covers the full range of HF operating, from ragchewing on sideband to digital modes on FSK to FM on the 10-meter band. The "all-mode" designation that appears in period descriptions is accurate. For an operator who wanted one box that could do everything from a 160-meter CW sked to a 10-meter FM repeater, this was that box.

Historical Context

The TS-450S is described as a popular HF transceiver known for solid performance across 160 through 10 meters, including the WARC bands. That's the extent of the reception history available. There's no design lineage, no market-positioning narrative, and no documentation of how it related to other Kenwood models of the era. The manual pairs it with the TS-690S, and a service manual sold on the classifieds covers both models plus the PS-53 and PS-33 power supplies, so those are the documented family connections. The manual describes the PS-53 as a heavy-duty supply delivering regulated 13.8 VDC at 20.5 A with a cooling fan and protection circuits, designed to match the TS-450S/690S. Whether either supply shipped as standard with the radio isn't stated.

Competitors named by owners are the Icom 735, the Icom IC-736, and the Icom 718. One owner came to the TS-450S from an Icom 735 and stayed for about 15 years. A Russian-language forum poster reported happily owning a TS-450S for a year and a half after five years with an Icom 718, and characterized the two as being on different levels, though the direction of that comparison isn't spelled out. The eham.net review page for the TS-450 carries 91 reviews, even if only fragments of them surfaced in the research.

Collectibility & Value

The TS-450 trades actively. One UK listing aggregator reports 87 Kenwood TS-450 ham radio listings in its index at the time of writing, with prices ranging from £3.59 to £1,620.05 and an average of £308.92. Parts radios and accessories sit at the bottom, and clean working examples with tuner and microphone sit at the top. A typical working unit sits somewhere around the £300 mark.

Most of these were working radios and most of them worked hard, so condition matters more than rarity. A representative eBay listing describes a unit as "Good Condition. Operation has been checked." A classified ad for a TS-450SAT describes it as looking good and working great, including tuner, mic, power cord, and a Mars mod, a common operator tweak. The service manual itself trades as a commodity, listed at $29 shipped. Spare parts surface too. A replacement knob encoder (Kenwood part K21-0791-02) is documented as a TS-450 part, and used original speakers come up for sale with immediate availability.

One documented interoperability quirk is worth knowing before you plug anything into the back. Coupling a KAM-Plus multimode controller to the Accessory-2 socket on a TS-450 or TS-850 produces noticeable distortion of transmitted audio when using the microphone in SSB mode. That's a specific, reproducible problem with a specific accessory, not a general fault. On the maintenance side, adjusting input sensitivity on both the TS-450 and TS-850 is described as straightforward, with the procedure and control location documented in the transceiver manuals.

No common failure modes beyond that KAM-Plus interaction are documented in the available sources, and no capacitor or display issues are reported. That's a thin record, not a clean bill of health.