WD4MSM Rating: 2020-12-14 A Radio Worthy of Your Consideration! Time Owned: more than 12 months. I have owned the TH-D74A for three years; I purchased it shortly after it was introduced. I was a longtime use of the Yaesu series of HTs. I owned the VX-5, the VX-7, and the VX-8. All of them were well-made radios that performed with zero problems. I took them around the world and operated in every type of weather imaginable. But the Kenwood TH-D74A was more than just a replacement for the Yaesu series HTs! The D74 is a major step up in both performance and capability. It is indeed a complicated little rig; that needs to be said at the outset. To set it up and use it on the local UHF/VHF repeaters is easy enough. However, to fully take advantage of all of its features will take some time and effort. In a way, that’s what makes this rig worth the money! As time goes by you will realize that there is always something else the radio has to offer. It’s a wideband scanner (emphasis on the wideband). It can listen in to almost any mode (AM, SSB, CW, FM, D-Star). With the proper HotSpot, it is also easily able to handle DMR and Fusion. It is fully featured for APRS, unlike many cheaper radios. There are lots of shortcuts available and memories that make APRS enjoyable; the GPS unit is addressable directly if you wish to record your track at any time. The D-Star mode is especially useful; it also is fully featured with lots of depth to explore. The broadcast FM (with a separate built-in antenna) works beautifully when you want to exit “Amateur Mode.” Because the speaker is larger than the Yaesu series radios, the sound quality and volume are exceptional. The Bluetooth used with AirBuds is a treat. Do you want to record your QSOs? The TF card storage and recording feature work like a charm; a large TF card will record many days worth of contacts with perfect clarity. The TF card is also useful to store setup features or anything else you want to recall at a later time. The screen is sharp enough to contain quite a bit of information, especially when you operate in a digital mode. The colored backgrounds alert you instantly to extra information (i.e., the color is not just for show – it aids in transmitting information). With the standard SMA antenna connector, I change antennas to suit my needs; an 18” Maldol works when hiking in the bush, a short 2.5” stubby antenna works best around town and connected to a “brick” amplifier in the car with a mag-mount antenna I have the perfect mobile rig. Paired with the RT Systems software used to program the radio, it’s quick to change configurations as the seasons and your locations change. Every past configuration can be saved for future use; it takes only seconds to download a new configuration into the radio. Get a good Cordura radio pouch and take it everywhere. Based on many years of entertainment, this is an inexpensive radio!

N2QGV Rating: 2020-12-02 It has all been said, but... Time Owned: more than 12 months. For almost two years now I have been enjoying this HT. I have only two issues, everything else I could say has been very positively reviewed. 1. A single memory position will not allow a split using frequencies in two different bands for Satellite use. 2. I rarely unplug or mess with the rubber, or what ever it is made of, piece that covers the accessory access ports on the right side of the HT. However, the piece seems to be growing in length and the covers no longer stays in place but just wobbles around interfering with holding the HT. Sent e-mail to Kenwood for their comments and solution. Would I buy it again?? No question, absolutely. Update, Kenwood replies within a day with several authorized part suppliers where the cover can be purchased from. Also gave step by step instructions. Replacement part ordered and mailed to me same day, Another *****'s to Kenwood.

KG7AV Rating: 2020-11-30 Spendy, But a LOT of radio Time Owned: 0 to 3 months. I don't know if there is anything like the 'perfect' HT, but dang this thing comes close. I got it primarily for the APRS / KISS functionality, and to begin the foray into D-STAR. As a field-expedient packet TNC for a bluetooth-equipped laptop, it works great. APRS functionality is also solid. Basic analog performance also great, as is the usual Kenwood sound quality. The wideband receiver supporting CW, USB, LSB, and AM works pretty well, especially with a clip on longwire antenna. So high marks as an all-around situational awareness HT. Still delving into the digital side, but initial trials with a local D-STAR repeater look good. Unit is very well built and has real heft. Once again Kenwood means good quality, lots of features, and $$$. Cons - the manual should be three times as thick as it is. In so many areas it just skims the basics. Thankfully there are a lot of videos and threads from others who have 'been there and figured it out'. The free programming software from Kenwood is okay, but comes up lacking in some basics when programming memory slots. You might want to shell out the extra $39 for the RT software, or hope that the CHIRP gang adds compatibility soon. Overall, this truly looks like the last HT I'll ever need.

KD8MJJ Rating: 2020-11-01 VERY IMPRESSIVE HT!!! Time Owned: 6 to 12 months. I have always been partial to Kenwood Radios, and this one has been hands down the best HT I have ever owned. I always wanted to get into D-STAR, but there wasnt a D-Star Radio out there that peaked my interests until I came across this one. I downloaded the memory program from Kenwood and was able to fill the memories up with bluetooth. One less cable necessary to program the radio. And the software was free. APRS is great with this unit, especially with the built in GPS. On-Board KISS modem for packet operations! With AGWPE and AGWTERM I was able to cruise around Nodes with just a HT and a laptop. NO CABLES NEEDED! WINLINK can be used with the KISS modem as well. The one drawback this radio has is it doesnt have DPRS abilities at the moment, but maybe someday a firmware update will correct that issue. ECHOLINK Memories! Just a couple buttons presses to connect to my favorite nodes. REMOTE CONTROL DTMF Memories for DTMF controllable Radios (V71-D710) No having to memorize the commands to control DTMF remote controlled Kenwood Radios (Cross-band Operations) Can Save the names of people you have had contact with on DSTAR. The XYL likes i can listen to the radio with a BT headset, can hide the radio under a coat and not look silly while grocery shopping. Built in Shortwave Receiver with CW filters! I enjoy that I can monitor my output on HF wearing a BT earpiece! Great when adjusting your EQ on the HF Rig! Kenwood is well noted for its sound! Can adjust TX/RX Equalizer levels! All around a great lil rig if you take the time to read the manual! Would recommend to an experienced user. I have elmered new users that wanted the best radio as their first.

N4ZTA Rating: 2020-10-25 About the best amateur HT out there Time Owned: 6 to 12 months. I'm on my 2nd D-74, most recently acquired on used for a good price from a reputable local ham. This is about the best amateur HT one can buy. Solidly built, advanced tech like APRS, D-Star and Bluetooth, and full power on 220. The radio has excellent performance, pretty good battery life considering what's going on under the hood DSP and display wise, and solid audio on the air. It isn't cheap, but one gets what one pays for. The radio is a cinch to program with the FREE MCP Kenwood gives away, some prefer the RT Systems route, but I would try the MCP first. It's a breeze. Kenwood hit a home run with this. Would love to see a mobile companion based off this radio.

KE7MU Rating: 2020-09-11 Great Radio Time Owned: more than 12 months. I finally got the device set up to use a hotspot and ground repeaters. Perhaps they should ship the radio in only one language, and better instructions. I shouldn't have to use YouTube videos to learn how to do things. Very poorly documented. On the other hand this radio does so much, that I think it's not just the most complex, but the most useful radio I have, and I have 14 different handys. Mostly Yeasu, first kenwood. I have no issues other than purchasing a radio that needs an immediate firmware update that is behind two versions. At least they stayed with free software as it's almost impossible to program with out the software. They should should include DMR with the next version of firmware. This radio is better than the ICOM dstar handhelds. Well time has past, and now have several more handhelds that include C4FM, and DMR. The kenwood D74 is by far the most sophisticated, if you can't afford it, don't buy it, go get a Chinese radio for the price of a burger n fries, but remember, you get what you pay for. Now some radios cost allot but don't perform as advertised, Kenwood radios are top notch.

W6CJ Rating: 2020-09-10 Good radio for my needs and was worth the price. Time Owned: more than 12 months. I've owned my D74A for just over one year. I wanted a handheld that could be used from my office or work vehicle; that covered three popular USA bands (2m, 1.2m, 70cm). At first, I was not looking for a D-STAR or APRS radio (I would get into those several months later) but thought it would be interesting to explore D-STAR and APRS when I had a lot of spare time. Along with my D74A, I purchased the KSC25LS charging stand; spare KNB75L battery; Tri-band (145-223-446 MHz) mobile antenna with magnetic mount; Comet HT-224 tri-band HT antenna.... as well as RT SYSTEMS programming software. The mobile antenna vastly improved my coverage, and so-one looked twice at the antenna on the trunk of my work vehicle. A word about the 220 MHz Amateur band: '220' is mainly in use in North America, and not too many other regions. Looking in an online repeater guide, you'll notice a lot of 220 MHz repeaters. Propagation is a bit like 145 MHz, with a lower noise floor and less interference from adjacent govt and commercial services. Some JA manufacturers reluctantly include 220 MHz, but at reduced RF power or functionality. The D74A has full 220 MHz power and functionality. The receive audio is good, and, you can also adjust the EQ in the transmit and receive audio (wish my FT3D did that on receive!!!!) I received good reports on FM and on D-STAR. Listening was not annoying or fatiguing because of the good audio. Battery life can be an issue. I keep extra batteries. It may help to shut off the GPS and bluetooth, and use low-power when talking on your D-STAR hotspot. I like the way that the D74A allows you to group memories. Endless possibilities there.. travellers can group memories by route or city.... You can scan a group, linked groups or everything in the radio. The 'A' and 'B' bands are easy to flip between. Only one 'may need improvement': In an imaginary 'D75' of the future, I'd like to see Kenwood incorporate a larger screen (NO TOUCH SCREEN, Thanks!) and keep the 220 MHz band. 73, W6CJ

KD7DGK Rating: 2020-08-27 A Bit Pricey, But It's A Good Radio Time Owned: 3 to 6 months. It's a bit pricey, but it's a good radio. First accessory you'll want to purchase is a second battery as this radio runs through the battery relatively quickly, more so than any of my Yaesu HTs. Overall, I'm very happy I purchased the Kenwood TH-D74A.

K7NG Rating: 2020-05-13 Superb product Time Owned: more than 12 months. I figured I'd never own one of these but I got lucky and found a used one in 95% condition for about half new cost. It's hard to ask for more in one handheld package than you'd get in the D74. I am just a touch dismayed by the short battery life, even with all but single-band basic FM mode turned off, but I can live with it, now that you can buy an aftermarket battery pack for about half of what Kenwood wants for theirs. I don't do satellites with HT's so the lack of crossband full-duplex doesn't mean much to me. I am slightly off-put by the ease the display screen can be scratched. But since it isn't a touch screen, I cut a cellphone screen protector film to the proper dimensions and stuck it on... however the first scratches remain. You have to USE this radio or you'll forget half of what the menu'd items do. That isn't a complaint. The availability of full-power 222 MHz FM (and D-Star, for what that's worth on 222) caused me to put my nice little Alinco DJ-G29 up for sale. I can travel with one less HT in the suitcase now. (I have a scaly old Johnson 5100 HT for 900 if I need it). Once again I found that I could use RT Systems software to set up the radio with ease. And yes, the aftermarket Diamond SRH320A antenna will make your on-air results more satisfactory. The radio, IMHO, is a keeper, despite a couple of small warts.

KE8BYU Rating: 2020-05-09 Glad I purchased this radio Time Owned: 0 to 3 months. Got Diamond tri-band antenna for $32 plus software, installed OK, just have to figure out how to use it. USB cable serves as connector to computer, which I have several of. Without reading manual, turned it on and set date, hello message which I changed to my call sign, and other settings in menu. No, I didn't read manual first. I grab my new radio and monkey with it and then read up on stuff I can't figure out on my own. Doesn't everyone do that? Don't know enough to rate this radio so this is first impression. I like it.

Kenwood Th D74 Programming Software

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I’m a Mac user. If you’re a Mac user in the ham world, you’re probably as familiar with how difficult it is to find good software for ham radio for the Mac.

Winlink on the TH-D74 using a Raspberry Pi I’m a Mac user. If you’re a Mac user in the ham world, you’re probably as familiar with how difficult it is to find good software for ham radio for the Mac. RT Systems KRS-D74 Programming software makes it easy to manage memory channel information and other menu settings of the Kenwood TH-D74 radio. Spreadsheet layout with many point and click options. ' Read' the current configuration from the radio for editing or start from scratch in a new file. The free programming software from Kenwood is okay, but comes up lacking in some basics when programming memory slots. You might want to shell out the extra $39 for the RT software, or hope that the CHIRP gang adds compatibility soon. Overall, this truly looks like the last HT I'll ever need.

With Portland NET, I’m being encouraged to get Winlink up and running if at all possible. Being on a Mac, this is not the easiest proposition. I’m not a fan of running things under WINE or running unsigned binaries or whatever. I’m fine with using a VM and running Linux inside it, but I made a bit of a mistake when I bought this laptop and thought 128GB of storage would be plenty. Pro tip: it’s not. But that’s ok. Because I have other options.

Fortunately, there’s a piece of software that looks actually quite good called Pat. It’s written in golang. It has a nice command line interface (my day job is working on linux servers and has been forever, so command line is life). It has a web based gui. And it says it supports KISS. I have a Kenwood TH-D74a which has a KISS TNC built in. Of course, I didn’t see the “linux only” part before I started playing around with it. Oops. And it seems the direct serial interface it has both doesn’t work with my setup and is very much not supported anymore.

It does seem that someone has gotten this working in the past using a proxy that Pat can talk to via some sort of TCP based protocol and the proxy translates that to KISS/AX25, but it’s quite old and I can’t seem to get it working. The KISS/AX25 projects it’s based on are self-described as “do not use” and the rewritten versions don’t seem to be fully done, so it’s kind of in a state of limbo. I considered trying to rewrite the proxy itself using a different language that has supported or at least functioning kiss/ax25 libraries, but without really knowing what I’m doing at all, I figure this is probably the wrong route to take at the moment.

Pat’s suggestion is to use Linux, which has native support for AX25, the protocol that winlink uses for transmitting packets over the air. Given my limited amount of storage on my laptop, I’m not really able to run a full VM just for that at the moment, so other options are required. One of those options is the ever awesome Raspberry Pi. The latest version, 3B+, has bluetooth, wifi, 4 usb ports, is plenty fast enough for my needs, etc. I picked one up on Amazon for about $35, along with a 32GB microsd card for about $8. Given that it has bluetooth, I’m thinking I should be able to connect it to my radio wirelessly, which allows me to stuff the rpi in the back of my tv cabinet somewhere after I get it up and running and not have to think about it too much anymore.

After hooking it up to my tv and a usb keyboard, I enabled ssh and hooked it up to wifi and went back to my couch with my laptop instead of sitting 3 feet in front of my TV on my ottoman. And then of course I couldn’t get the pi and the radio to see each other, no matter which one I set to discoverable and which one I set to scan. I was able to get the pi to see the radio, but establishing a connection wasn’t working. Before I gave up on the bluetooth route, I searched for a message I saw Failed to connect: org.bluez.Error.NotAvailable and found a forum post which talks about what I suspected that error meant, that the radio and the pi couldn’t establish a common profile, in this case the serial port profile. Sadly, after much mucking about with it, I was still unable to get it working, so I bailed on that and am just going to use USB for now.

USB worked just fine out of the box. On the TH-D74a you need to set the KISS mode to USB (menu 983) and the USB Function to COM+AF/IF Output (menu 980) and plug it in. A lot of other types of radios have a USB adapter you can buy which is almost always just a USB to serial adapter with an FTDI chip and a the correct wiring to get it to talk to the radio (either UART or I2C). RT systems sells these as well, except they are “branded” and don’t work with standard FTDI drivers and, at least on the mac, the drivers they provide don’t work because they aren’t signed. I don’t recommend any RT systems cables to anyone. Anywho. The TH-D74a basically just has one built in and it’s FTDI compatible!

If I screen /dev/ttyACM0 9600 and type ID I get back ID TH-D74, so I know it’s working! Hooray!

Ok, so on to trying to set up Pat. First, to install it. Which has some dependencies of its own. First, I need golang to be installed. I used apt-get install golang on the pi to grab go, which is version 1.7. Then I needed git because go get uses git under the hood, so I installed that. I set my GOPATH environment variable to $HOME/go and once all of that was done, go get github.com/la5nta/pat finally worked correctly.

From there it was following along on the AX.25 Linux instructions which were easy to follow along with. When I got to the axlisten part, I got a bit sad, as the local frequency I’m trying to use isn’t very active, so I don’t know if it’s working or not. But onward I press!

I got to configuring pat and setting up the ax25 interface and such and all seemed well. Then I got this error: 2019/05/05 03:22:29 Unable to establish connection to remote: AX.25 support not included in this build. I thought to myself… WHAT?! Isn’t that the whole point of this? Perhaps it’s a raspberry pi issue, maybe the code doesn’t work on ARM or something. No. Not so much. According to some other docs I needed to add build tags to get ax25 support. Which also required me to install libax25-dev.

Connect!

Nothing happened.

I forgot to mention that in the middle here I had to relocate the pi. I’d gotten a couple of messages about under voltage and thought maybe I needed a beefier USB power supply, so I shut the pi down and moved the whole setup to the kitchen. When I got logged back into the pi everything seemed fine, but I couldn’t use screen to connect anymore, for some reason. Strange. So I think that’s what’s happening right now. I’m going to reboot everything and see if that fixes it. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” :)

Success! At least, success using screen to connect and send an ID command. Let’s try the rest of it again. Nope. I didn’t hear anything from my radio. I didn’t see any activity indication, and no output. When I finally gave up and hit ctrl-c, I got 2019/05/05 03:36:42 Unable to establish connection to remote: Dial timeout as output, so something isn’t quite right.

Google to the rescue! According to The Fine Manual™, I need to set the TNC into KISS mode. Oops.

Ok, so I got that set up. Then I was trying some winlink nodes I found on winlink.org but not really having any luck. A quick google search for “portland packet repeater” turned up the Portland Amateur Radio Club repeater list, which mentions a packet repeater that had been replaced with a winlink node. 144.910 / W7LT-10. So I tuned my radio to that frequency and tried to connect. Suddenly I was deafened by my radio. I’d turned the volume way up trying to hear if there was anything, and hadn’t turned it down. So when that winlink node started talking to me I heard it. It was glorious.

So, it worked? There was lots of back and forth between my radio and the remote system, but judging by the output, everything worked!

So, what now? Well, Pat has a web interface. So I fired it up: pat http -a 0.0.0.0:8080 (the 0.0.0.0 makes it listen on all interfaces, not just localhost, and since I’m connecting from my laptop to the raspberry pi I need to do this). Opening my browser to the web interface, and I’m greeted with what looks like a webmail view!

Success!

And it looks like I have mail!

Great!

Then I updated my password and sent myself a test message!

Kenwood Th D74 Firmware Update

A couple of round trips connecting to the winlink system later and I have a new piece of mail!

Kenwood Mcp D74 Software

Awesome!

Kenwood Th-d74 Software Mac Free

Now, since AE7XP has been one of the folks hounding me about getting winlink going, I dropped him a message just to see if it’s all working. As far as I know winlink is also able to send and receive email from the internet, so one final test:

And a short time later…

Excellent! Now I have something to talk about on the NET net tomorrow night! :)

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