Sorry, I meant the VGS-1.  Nothing on Kenwood's site about which
models have it.  On the page for it, there's a link to the 480 and
that's it.

Lots of folks have discussed why the pitch goes up when you increase
the speed.  I suspect this is because the chip is playing back
pre-recorded samples when it reads out each character from the
display.  Since sound is sampled at a particular rate per second, if
you play back the sample faster, there is a corresponding increase in
pitch.  It is possible to stop this from happening programatically,
but it requires additional code, and thus additional hardware in the
chip.  So I guess the folks at Kenwood figured it was better to have
someone from the Lollipop Guild announcing frequencies than to do the
extra work to bring the pitch back down (and charge all of us more for
it!).

73,

David Thurmond, KK4ADV