[Alexandria Radio Club Reflector] DSTAR on the Kenwood TH-D74A

[Ian]

A growing number of us have the recently introduced Kenwood TH-D74A
handheld.  2m, 70cm, and 1.25m on FM and DSTAR.  5W on all bands!  And
Batteries America, maybe others, now have a 2000mAh aftermarket battery for
around $50.  The radio worked great at Hamvention this year AFTER we
discovered a few tricks.

Unlike Icom's implementation of DSTAR, Kenwood makes a distinction in the
operating mode.  If you're going through a repeater the mode is DR, for
simplex it's DV.  If you are using Kenwood's or RTSystems' software to
program your radio watch for this in the 'mode' drop-down list. You may
have to scroll down to get to 'DV' for simplex channels.  The other
difference is with digital coded squelch.  This is used like a tone on FM.
On the Kenwood you'll usually want 'DCS', not 'CCS'.  The RTSystems
software appears to default to 'CCS', or callsign coded squelch, and
wouldn't be too useful on a frequency used by more than two hams.

Also, I was able to route back to W4HFH_B through BridgeCom's 1.25m dual
mode repeater.  Pretty cool.

73, Ian N8IK