I have a kenwood 820 on uhf and considering the 850.  I put up one of 
those for our club in Las Vegas a year or so ago.  A little of the 
programming software is accessible, but I find much of it is not.  I'm 
fortunate in that I use to do commercial stuff so I have a service monitor 
and I can tune my duplexers.  I control the ifr 1200 with a program I 
wrote in basic and then compiled.  I can recall memories, take meter 
readings every so many seconds and so forth with this little program.  Of 
corse the ifr makes it easy to tune up the machine, check receiver and so 
forth.
73
Butch
WA0VJR