So I got lucky over the last weekend hamfest, and scored a Kenwood TH-D74 radio. I’ve spent most of yesterday pouring through online videos, posts, and other bits of info getting overloaded on all things Kenwood. This isn’t the only Kenwood radio I have, but I will say I’m very much used to the Yaesu menus and layouts, but this D74 isn’t too bad; having a nice color screen with menus in plain English certainly helps, but I’ve already fallen into the “you messed it up” trap by downloading the Kenwood MCP (memory control program) software, and trying to program the radio for my needs and likes.
So to keep things short, I did so and at first things seemed great, but then I tried to play with the D-Star mode, and suddenly found that while I could get into it before, “DR” mode seemed to be disabled/gone after reprogramming.
After perusing several posts and trying different things, first and foremost being in VFO mode, nothing seem to work and I could only get it to DV mode. (DV is for using dstar in a simple mode, where DR is for using D-Star with repeaters.)
Lastly, I realized I must have screwed something up, so I went back into the MCP program and poked around. There it was: the “repeater list” was completely empty, and so I guess it can’t go into D-Star repeater mode without having a list of repeaters to provide you.
I ended up finding this link which let me generate a new up-to-date repeater list, which I was able to import by going to Repeater List in MCP, then click “Import Repeater List from File” at the bottom. I imported the file, and it seemed to work. (It did mention a couple entries not working, but seemed to be fine otherwise.)
From there I re-uploaded my config to the radio, and DR mode is now available again.
As always, I didn’t see this posted anywhere else, so I wanted to share it here.