Python TM-D700a Control Library

I recently purchased a TM-D700a at a hamfest which was missing the control head. I didn't realize that control heads for this radio were quite rare. Thankfully it turns out you can control pretty much the whole radio from the microphone and monitor it's status over it's serial port. I started a small Python project to provide a script to program the memories from a CSV file and a simple curses-based monitoring program to display the frequency, memory channel, etc. It's on GitHub at https://github.com/n1ywb/pytmd700

TS-120 Tribulations

I recently picked up a Kenwood TS-120S at a hamfest for what I thought was a fair price. I asked the seller if there was anything wrong with it and he showed my how sometimes the PLL would unlock and pushing on a particular connector would 'fix' it. "No biggie" I thought, "loose connection, a little NoAlOx will fix it". Also there was no mic. I brought the rig home with a CB mic I found for a dollar.

Once home, the rig's true nature quickly became clear. USB reception was only possible with the IF shift knob was turned fully clockwise. USB transmission was impossible. LSB transmission sounded like crap. Turning the power higher than a watt or two caused the finals to oscillate with full 100W power forwards and reflected. The audio was crackly and the PLL lockup issue was a significant annoyance. Sometimes after TX the RX sensitivity would dive.

After way way too much time on the bench, I finally have these issues resolved to my satisfaction. 10m TX audio is still distorted, but I get good audio reports on other bands and have made several contacts on 20 and 40 meters.

I suspect this radio will eventually find it's way into my Jeep.

Here is a full list of the work I did to resurrect this rig.

PA Board

Distorted TX audio & CW tone

• Exciter output sounded great but PA output sounded like garbage. Properly adjusted base currents; still sounds bad on 10m, other bands OK
  

Preventative Maintenance

• Resoldered all transistors.
• Applied fresh heatsink compound.

 

RF Board

Preventative Maintenance

• Replaced D2,3,4,5 and 8 on RF board with new 1N914 parts. D8 showed high reverse leakage in circuit, but that may have been caused by an alternate path to ground.

Finals Oscillating

• Applied SB-844 to resolve PA oscillation; R47, R50, and C61 already had the updated values, from the factory I think; Did NOT add series diodes due to possible RX IMD degradation; Did add AVB bypass cap.
  

 

IF Board

Loss of RX sensitivity after TX

• I found that sometimes after TX, RX sensitivity would be lost, and a bonking the rig would bring it back. Replaced IF board relay RL1 with new part. See also filter board repair.

 

Filter Board

Loss of RX sensitivity after TX

• I found that sometimes after TX, RX sensitivity would be lost, and a bonking the rig would bring it back. Replaced Filter board relay RL1 with new part. See also IF board repair.

Preventative Maintenance

• Applied SB-051 Final Protection mod

 

AF Gen Board

Symptom: Crackly RX audio, PLL unlock (dots on display)

• Re-soldered broken joints on Q3 & Q7 on AF board; solder cracked due to thermal cycling and insufficient solder from the factory; I would check Q2 also.

Preventative Maintenance

• Replaced C10, C11, C13 and C16

 

CAR Board

Symptom: USB BFO frequency low

• At first, USB reception was only possible with the IF shift knob cranked fully clockwise. During alignment it became clear that the USB BFO frequency could not be brought into spec. It's supposed to be 8.8315MHz, and the highest I could get was 8.8314MHz, which is a big problem. This is probably due to the crystal aging. I got the CAR board set up so I could play with it in vivo and experiment with adding additional capacitors in parallel with C22. I found a 1pf cap lowered the resonant frequency just a bit. I then put the 1pf cap in series with C2 22pf USB CAR osc fixed cap. That brought up the frequency into the useful adjustment range of the trimcap, making it possible to complete the carrier point step of the alignment procedure.
  

 

Misc

• Drilled holes in sides of front panel to access front assembly screws without removing panel; this makes removing the RF board much easier; loosen shaft coupler front set screws; remove front panel screws; pull front panel forward to free shaft from coupler; remove rf board screws; angle front panel down, remove RF board by sliding up and back off the shaft.

 

Alignment

1. Checked PSU voltages, OK
2. Adjusted USB & LSB car outputs; OK
3. Adjusted CW CAR; NOT OK! Behaves oddly; rx freq = usb freq; tx freq is offset lower; procedure calls to adjust VR2 to set CW car osc rx freq but adjusts tx freq instead (sigh). Need to review TS-130 manual for potentially improved procedure.
4. TX/RX IF shift; OK
5. Center RIT; OK
6. Carrier suppression; nulled by ear with a second receiver
7. Carrier point; adjusted first using factory procedure, then by ear listening to RX signals
8. Adjusted final PA base current; OK

Twiddled RF board output balanced mixer balance trimpot; oops; how to fix? Not documented in svc manual.

Still To Do:

1. Apply SB-037 VOX Operation Pick-up Time
2. Apply SB-816 Band Pass Filter Change
3. Adjust CW CAR
4. Add speech proc
5. Add DSP (or a notch filter at least)

Area 2m Repeater Report

Here's a list of 2m repeaters I can hit from my QTH in Barre Vermont, using my Yaesu FT-1500 50 watt mobile rig (38 watts measured) into a 1/4 wave vertical, up about 18 feet.

FREQ	CALLSIGN	LOCATION	Report	Notes
145.150	WB1GQR	Bolton	59
145.410	K1VIT	Fayston	59
146.625	W1BD	Williamstown	59
146.760	W1UWS	Mt Ascutney	22	QRN
146.880	W1ABI	Killington	59
146.940	W1CTE	Mt Mansfield	59	QRM
147.150	W2UXC	Plattsburgh NY	44	DX!
147.390	N1IOE	Barre	59

Codec2 - Next-Generation Digital Voice for Two-Way Radio

Codec2 is an awesome, new, award winning, free as-in freedom, open source, digital voice codec. Codec2 was developed primarily by David Rowe Ph.D., VK5DGR, specifically to avoid the intellectual property encumbrances of the digital voice codecs currently in use.

By now you've probably heard of D-STAR. What you may not know is that the voice encoding protocol (codec) used by D-STAR, AMBE, is a proprietary patented trade secret.* Under no circumstances may you inspect, dissect, examine, or modify the codec. This is not in the spirit of amateur radio! Unfortunately most of the other digital voice codecs in use today suffer from similar encumbrances.

In 2008, well-known open source advocate and Amateur Extra Bruce Perens, K6BP, recognized the danger of closed codecs, and began to advocate and evangelize the need for a free as-in freedom codec for hams. Thankfully, Bruce was able to recruit successful open source codec developer David Rowe to our cause. David has an impressive and extensive digital voice resume, and he co-developed the Speex codec, one of the most popular VoIP codecs on the Internet today.

Dave et al have designed Codec2 and created a free open source reference implementation, released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, meaning that it's free and easy to incorporate into other software, even commercial applications. The reference implementation is written in C and targets Linux, with work on Windows compatibility underway (Cygwin is already supported). I was able to download it and easily compile it on my Ubuntu Linux box and encode/decode some sample audio files. I think it sounds GREAT, even at it's narrowest bandwidth!

The reference implementation includes an FDMDV softmodem optimized for use with Codec2. Remember that a codec converts one digital stream to another digital stream; it must be modulated on an analog signal to be transmitted over the air. The FDMDV modem works with your sound card, much like PSK31 or SSTV, and is optimized for HF. The FDMDV modem may also be used with VHF+ FM radios, although an optimized GMSK modem is planned for such operation.

Not only is Codec2 free, but David has managed to produce a codec of truly superlative technical quality. On HF, Codec2 bandwidth is as narrow as 1.1khz; HALF of SSB! On VHF+, 3kHz channels should be easily attained, with 2kHz channels possible depending on radio quality. That's ½ to ¼ the bandwidth of other popular codecs such as AMBE. Power efficiency is easily double that of existing codecs, and hence range is substantially improved. Sound quality is excellent for a voice codec. Depending on the modem used with the codec, amplifiers may be non-linear, hence cheaper and more efficient. The bottom line is that Codec2 beats the snot out of all other digital radio voice codecs!

Because Codec2 is a free and open specification, it is not an “unspecified digital code under FCC rule 97.309(b)”, and may be legally used for international communications. Contrast this with the situation in France, which has completely banned D-STAR due to the closed nature of AMBE.

On July 24 the ARRL announced David Rowe as the recipient of the 2012 ARRL Technical Innovation Award for his work on Codec2. The Board noted that Rowe “has been a major leader and the primary technical author of an open-source CODEC2 protocol, designed to address the impediment to the development of amateur digital voice posed by closed-source protocols.”

Codec2 and FDMDV are currently usable, but are in an “alpha” stage. Development and testing are well underway, including on the air testing. There's a GUI in the works, but right now it's just a collection of command line utilities and libraries, so that's a bit of a hurdle for less technical folks. I hope we soon start to see Codec2 support in the popular PC SDR apps, and DSP radios like the K3 should be able to support it with a firmware upgrade. I for one am looking forward to trying Codec2 on the air, and I'll be sure to report my findings when I do.

For more information:

http://codec2.org/

http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=452

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec2

http://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-board-of-directors-names-award-recipients-at-2012-second-meeting

* If you were in the D-STAR presentation at the 2010 RANV HAMCON, you may have caught me giving the presenter, Cal Calvitto, WA1WOK, a little friendly heckling about AMBE (Sorry Cal, nothing personal, and I did enjoy your presentation). Yes, D-STAR takes a lot of heat. Yes, the codec situation is unacceptable. It's also pretty lame that Icom trademarked it even though JARL invented it. And the rigs cost a fortune. That said, I have reviewed the D-STAR specification, and aside from those issues, I think it's actually a pretty good system. If the issues can be surmounted, then I would be happy to see D-STAR with Codec2 become widely adopted by the ham community.

Weather Radio DXing

I recently built and installed a 1/4 wave vertical antenna for the 2m ham band. I used an aluminium boom from an old TV antenna for a mast; it's not super strong, but it's a light antenna. After trying to think of a way to homebrew a mount, I ended up using this 24" stand off mount to install it on the house under the eves, right outside my shack. I'd say it's up about 20 feet.

I hooked it up to my cheap new scanner, which has a WX button that scans the weather band. I thought it would be fun to listen to the dulcet tones of the NOAA voice synthesiser for a while and log all the NOAA weather stations I could hear. Here's the list with notes:

Call	Location	Miles	Report
KIG60	Mt. Mansfield, VT	27	Full quieting.
WWG50	Burke Mtn., VT	38	Full quieting.
KZZ41	Mt. Washington, NH	59	Mostly quieting, solid copy.
WNG546	Moose Mtn., NH	38	Very little quieting, poor copy.
WXM44	Mt. Ascutney, VT	54	Mostly quieting, good copy.
KSC43	Gore Mtn., NY	86!	Full quieting, excellent copy!

There you go, six stations, including one 86 miles away, past the Green Mountains, way over on Gore Mt. in New York! Must be an inversion!

Radio Shack PRO-2038 Scanner Review

I wanted a way to have a permanent receiver in the shack for monitoring local VHF/UHF amateur activity. Something I could just leave on all the time and never be tempted to remove from the shack and put in a car. I could have just bought a ham transceiver, but I decided a scanner might be a better fit for a couple of reasons:

1. Cost: I got my scanner for $20 shipped. It being so cheap I will be less tempted to ever take it out of the shack, because I have real radios for that. If I really feel the need to have a scanner in the car or in the field, I can cheaply buy another one.
2. Speed: Scanners are blazingly fast, even old ones. Most ham radios scan very slowly, especially the older cheaper ones. With lots of channels programmed, you're lucky if it ever stops on any activity, and if it does half the time you just catch the squelch tail.
3. Frequency coverage: Even cheap scanners cover 28mhz through 450mhz; some go up to 900MHz.

I found a Radio Shack PRO-2038 scanner on eBay, and won it for $20, shipped. I know it's a rebadged Uniden, but I'm not sure the equivalent Uniden model.

Being somewhat new to scanners in general, I was a bit surprised to discover how it "really" worked. It's billed as a "50 channel" scanner. The reality is more complex and, unfortunately for amateur use, limited.

It has six "banks", the first five of which are pre-programmed with relevant frequencies; Fire, police, air, weather, marine VHF. Then there's the "Private" bank, which is where you put your ham channels. Unfortunately the "Private" bank only has 20 channels. So what about the other 30 programmable channels? Turns out they are in the fire and police banks, so you can add new frequencies to those banks. You COULD use them for ham stuff but then you'd also be scanning 500 police frequencies at the same time. Also you can only scan one particular bank at a time, so if you want to monitor fire AND police, or fire AND amateur, SOL; buy two scanners (or one with a more flexible memory system). I guess those are the limits of circa 1993 scanner technology.

The bottom line is that, for amateur use, this is a 20 channel scanner. That's adequate for me. I don't think there are more than 20 active VHF ham channels that I can pick up from my QTH. I programmed all 20 channels and most of them are silent 24/7. Some are distant repeaters and I may just be out of range. Others are local repeaters and simplex freqs with zero activity; sad.

The built-in speaker fires down, which renders speech unintelligible when the unit sits on a flat surface. With an external speaker, the audio sounds fine.

I get crud on 146.550 sometimes. Sometimes it sounds like a pager, sometimes it sounds like music. It's a bit odd because there are no strong transmitters in my immediate vicinity. I keep that channel locked out much of the time, which is unfortunate, because my area does have some activity there.

Overall I'm satisfied with my purchase. I can monitor pretty much all of the active VHF/UHF channels in my area and it scans a lot faster than most ham rigs. If you live in an area with more activity, you might want a scanner with more channels.

Getting Started in Ham Radio

Ham radio, or more properly "Amateur Radio", is a hobby and a public service. Ham radio officially exists to
1. Promote the radio arts
2. Enhance international goodwill
3. Maintain a pool of skilled radio operators

You can use Ham radio for anything you like, with some restrictions
1. No commercial activity
2. No music
3. No "broadcasting"
4. No facilitating a crime

You do need a license. The Technician level license is pretty easy to get. If you are reasonably technically inclined and can read and remember simple rules, then you can probably study for it in a weekend; it's 35 multiple-choice questions. The exam fee is like $10 or something and the license is good for 10 years I think, after which time you pay another $10 to renew.

The biggest technical advantage to a ham radio over a CB or a FRS (Family Band) radio is range. CBs use AM, which is very inefficient, and are limited to 5 watts output power, and small CB antennas tend to be inefficient. FRS uses FM, which is better than AM, but are limited to ½ watt and a may not use external antennas at all! For local comms, Hams typically run 5-50 watts of power using FM on VHF or UHF with efficient external antennas when possible. I run a 5/8ths wave VHF antenna that is about 1.5 feet long. It's got a gain of about 3db (roughly doubles signal strength). A 1.5 foot CB antenna is going to have a loss of about -12db (you lose about 3/4 of your signal) and that's IF it's properly installed and tuned and everything.

The reliable range on a VHF ham radio can really be startling compared to CB. Hams put repeaters up on high mountains so as long as both folks are within range of the mountain top, they can communicate, even if they are not within range of each other. Depending on terrain, antenna height, power, and other factors, repeaters can have a reliable radius of 50 to 100 miles or more. VHF ham radios are pretty cheap and pretty easy to use and it's how most people get started in Ham radio nowadays.

HF range is basically world wide, but it's less reliable, since it uses ionospheric reflection, which varies depending on the time of day, solar conditions, and other random factors. There is a technique called NVIS that provides pretty reliable comms for a radius of about 300 miles, without using repeaters, but it's still not immune to space weather. Equipment is more expensive and trickier to use, and the antennas tend to be bigger. But for expeditions way out into the back country it might be the only means available (other than sat phone which costs $$$) of communicating with the rest of the world.

There's also ham satellites but they can be tricky to use, mostly because there are too many satellite users and not enough satellites.

Honestly a lot more wheelers do run CB so you really do need it on the trail. But CB activity among the general public has pretty much fallen off. Ham radio activity is actually increasing. I can almost always get somebody useful up on my ham radio, no matter how far out in the sticks and out of cell phone range I am, from down in a gulch that the CB would never get out of. So I do think it's useful to have in a rig, especially if you hit the back country. And when you wheel with somebody else with a ham radio you can make private jokes about everyone else and their chicken band radios And the calibre of ham radio operators tends to be higher than CB, since it's a licensed service. If you are travelling a lot it's a great way to spend time on the road, chatting on the radio.

Randall/Larsen antennas are the only ones worth looking at IMO. If you get a VHF/UHF ant, get the one with the OPEN coil. Mag mounts WILL get knocked off your jeep by brush, etc, and it sucks when they get wrapped around your axle (don't ask how I know) so I recommend a more permanent mount. Don't be afraid to drill holes in your roof.

Always wire positive and negative wires directly to the battery with fuses on both. Use heavy gauge wire, 12ga minimum, 10ga is better.

2m is the all-around most useful ham band.

Getting licensed is easy:

1. Study up: http://www.hello-radio.org/ 
2. Memorize the test answers: http://www.arrl.org/arrlvec/pools.html 
3. Buy a book (bookstores, RadioShack, online): http://www.arrl.org/shop/Ham-Radio-License-Manual-Revised-2nd-Edition/ 
4. Take a practice test: http://www.qrz.com/testing.html 
5. Take a class if necessary: http://www.arrl.org/FandES/courses/ 
6. Take the real test (cost $15, bring cash & two forms of ID): http://www.arrl.org/find-an-amateur-radio-license-exam-session

After you pass the test, you can start searching for yourself in the FCC database. As soon as you find your callsign there, you can start operating even before you receive your paper license in the mail. Usually takes 1 to 3 weeks tho sometimes longer. Put in your name as "lastname, firstname"
http://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/UlsS...rchAmateur.jsp

Buy a radio: http://www.hamradio.com

Join the ARRL: https://www.arrl.org/join-arrl-renew-membership/

Join a local club: http://www.arrl.org/find-a-club/

Join an emergency service like ARES or RACES: http://www.emergency-radio.org/

Follow da rulez: http://www.arrl.org/part-97-amateur-radio

Go to a hamfest: http://www.arrl.org/hamfests.html

If anybody has specific questions feel free to message me, I can give you my email and help you with whatever you need to get licensed.

Good luck, 73 de n1ywb

Arcade Fire

I was flipping through old issues of QST and I found an article about Arcade Fire! They were interviewed in the November 2010 issue (ARRL members only). It seems that Win and Will Butler's grandfather was Alvino Rey, W6UK (SK). Although the band members are not hams themselves, they have fond memories of their Grandfather's ham activities, and support Amateur Radio in general. They have used ham radio imagery in their stage video for "We Used to Wait", including some of W6UK's QSL cards.

When you start dealing with people, or art, when your primary concern is how to make money, I think the "quality of services" decline rapidly in the search for a higher profit.

The song "We Used to Wait" is about writing letters, and it seemed a natural fit to use the (W6UK's) QSL cards. We try to give out secret plugs to Alvino whenever we can.

I guess there was a brief conspiracy theory that we were going to release the album first over ham radio.

I know it's not totally required anymore, but I would feel bad about becoming a ham without being fully fluent in Morse code.

2012 IARU HF Championship

I like the IARU HF Championship because it comes right after field day, and it usually signals the zenith of my interest in ham radio for the year. After the IARU I usually start to feel like I better enjoy summer before it ends, and then in the fall the holidays come and projects are forgotten.

This year I again entered in the Single Op Phone Only QRP category. I'm sort of an accidental QRP-er. I built an Elecraft K2 fully intending to later build the KPA100 100w amplifier. I still fully intend to do so some day. In the meantime I'm stuck on QRP.

The K2 is a competent contest receiver. Once a station is out of the filter, it usually doesn't cover up the weak ones. I did have to give a wide birth to the  transmissions from N1UR who was operating across town at higher power. That said we successfully operated simultaneously on the same bands and indeed worked each other on several of them.

I connected the K2 to a large wire loop up perhaps 30 to 40 feet, fed with window line via a tuner. I cut the antenna to the size that would fit easily in my yard, which was a bit less than would be resonant on 80m. This would become a problem later. I supported it at three points, and it forms roughly a right triangle.

I was hoping 10 meters would open, so I also operated a separate rig on 10 meters, a RadioShack HTX-10. I call this poor-man's SO2R. This radio lacks a power control, so I turned the mic gain down to limit the PEP to five watts. This radio works fairly well and I made several contacts on it. I fed this rig into my MFJ Super Hi-Q Loop on a post in the garden. This antenna is actually quite efficient on 10m, I think about 90% vs a free space dipole; not bad for a four foot diameter loop. It's bandwidth is also relatively high on 10m.

Typically in this contest I do not find CQ-ing to be very productive. I do it sometimes, usually with the voice keyer when things are slow and I need to stand up and stretch. And I make some contacts. But I make the bulk doing search and pounce.

I scrub the bands in this contest. It's important to catch as many multipliers as possible, so it's important to understand propagation and who will be on what band at what time. It's also important to simply tune around because there are always surprises.

I always like to tune in the direction of decreasing pitch. That is in the direction in which signals start out high pitched and gradually come down in to tune. I think this technique lets you better perceive the individual stations before you're on top of them, making it easier to tune them in quickly without skipping past them. It's easier to hear a station with a higher pitched tone and they enter the passband earlier as you tune. This way as you work one station you can hear the noise from next one and jump straight to it. So when I search a USB band, I always tune upwards, and on an LSB band I tune downwards.

There's no band time limit for single op and I take full advantage of that. For most of the contest I was sweeping 15, 20, and 40 meters on the K2, and periodically working 10m on the HTX-10; a few times when 10 sounded really hot I moved the K2 there to take advantage of it's superior performance. But mostly I searched and pounced on the K2 and periodically multiplexed simultaneous S&P on the HTX-10.

I decided I would start out CQ-ing on 20m at the contest start and see if I could make a few contacts before the band turned into a complete zoo. I did quickly make a few contacts, and then they dried up, so I went to S&P, as usual. I moved the K2 to 15m and spent a substantial amount of time there, periodically going back to 20, and working 10 on the HTX-10.

I focused heavily on multipliers, although I never passed up the chance to make a QSO if I thought I could do so relatively quickly.

Band conditions were mostly quite good. 10m was a nice surprise; I made 25 QSOs including 14 multipliers. I worked DX stations in South America, the Carribian, and even Europe and the Pacific. It was open to South America well into the night.

15m was excellent and was the best performing band for me, yielding 115 QSOs. Although I periodically jumped to 20m, I spent most of the day and evening on 15, working some excellent DX all over the world. Finally as it started to shut down I began to work 20m more heavily and added 40m to the rotation.

20m was a zoo for much of the contest and I tried to avoid it to a certain degree. It seems to be the band I have the most trouble making contacts on; it's full of loud stations that can't hear me. It was still my second best band, though, yielding 100 QSOs and 42 multipliers. 20m shut down in the wee hours and never really came back.

40m was a strong band for me, yielding 78 QSOs and 33 multipliers. I was able to work Europe, South America, and the Pacific. Later in the wee hours the recent CME triggered a G2 geomagnetic storm and 40m was pretty washed out by it.

When I tried to get on 80m, to my dismay I discovered that my antenna would absolutely not tune up. I am scratching my head because I'm fairly certain I had tested it and found it to be OK. I considered a few emergency repair attempts, but after giving 80m a listen and hearing no more than three contest stations, and still making a decent rate on 40m, I decided to write 80m off. This was probably the right move as 80m never seemed to improve. I did miss a few multipliers though, and it's a lesson in why you should test your equipment thoroughly well in advance of the contest and not just slap it together like I do.

Finally at 1100z I called it quits. Every band was dead, and worked out anyway. Also I wasn't feeling too hot after 25 hours of wakefulness. At an ending rate of 2 QSOs per hour, I don't think I missed much in that one hour.

In 2009 I won the Single Op Phone Only QRP category in the W/VE area with a score of 15,300. This year my claimed score is 113,696!  Band conditions were certainly much better than in 2009, even with the geomagnetic storm. We'll see how this also benefited my competition, but I have a good feeling that I may place first again. And it just goes to show that you don't need the world's greatest station to be competitive in radiosport. The operator makes the station. With persistence and skill, even a modest station can prove competitive.

QRP phone is a tough category and I want to thank everybody who worked me for their patience and persistence in pulling me out of the noise.

Review: TYT TH-UVF1 Dual band HT

I have a bad habit of losing HTs. I've lost three since I got my ticket, with a combined value approaching $1000. Not good. Thankfully China has finally figured out how to make ham radios, which sell for the usual cut-rate price.

Of course I'm not interested in being an early adopter. But now QST has reviewed these and found them to be OK if not great. Also several members of my club (RANV) have purchased these or similar Chinese radios and have acceptable reports. So I decided to take the plunge.

I purchased mine at the RANV Winter Hamfest on Feb 28, 2012, for the show special price of $109. I also purchased a mini speaker-mic and USB programming cable for $19.99 each.

In the box was the radio, a drop in charger, both an AC adapter and a cigarette lighter adapter for the charger, a belt clip with lanyard, and the "manual". The belt clip attaches to the radio with screws, which is a bit unusual.

The radio user interface is pretty bad, although many Japanese HTs have terrible interfaces as well. It's obvious that this radio was intended primarily for commercial service where it would be programmed in the shop. Self programming is a bit of an afterthought. It's not that the interface is complex, actually it's rather spartan. Just not well thought out or implemented. But once you get the hang of navigating the menus it's usable. At the hamfest it only took me a few minutes to program in our local repeater and key it up.

They must have thrown darts at a wall to decide which features to assign hotkeys to. Two thirds of them could have been better assigned to other functions.

The manual is pretty bad too. It does an acceptable job of explaining the basic features albeit in very broken English. For $100 they could have hired somebody on Elance to proofread it. Whatever. Some of the feature descriptions are just indecipherable.

All that said the radio has some nice features. It operates on 2m and 70cm with dual watch. Note this is NOT dual-receive; it can only receive ONE signal at a time. Dual-watch works in essence by scanning between the two channels. It receives FM broadcast and has over 100 memories. The LCD is brightly lit and easily readable. The build quality seems good; it does not feel like a cheap radio, probably owing to it's commercial target market. It has alphanumeric memory names.

The two features most sorely missing from this rig are auto-repeater-offset, and memory to VFO copy. Automatic repeater offset, or ARO, automatically picks the direction and magnitude of the uplink frequency for a repeater based on the standard ARRL bandplan, which most repeaters follow. With ARO all you really need to know about a repeater is the downlink frequency and maybe the CTCSS code if it uses one. Without ARO you also need to know the direction and size of the offset. Size is fortunately standard, 600KHz on 2m and 1MHz on 70cm. Direction unfortunately varies randomly depending on band segment, so the only way to know is to look it up (or memorize the bandplan).

The lack of MR->VFO means that you must program a memory channel correctly on the first try. If you screw up, you have to start over from scratch. You can't copy the memory to the VFO, fix the one mistake you made, and save it back to memory as on other radios. You must re-set every setting you wish to store including frequency, offset, tone squelch, name, etc before saving to memory. This is pretty annoying. Most folks seem to work around this issue by buying the programming cable.

On air the radio works fine. I live out in the country so interference isn't a big issue; the ARRL lab gave the receiver pretty crappy marks so you might have a different experience if you live in a city. Rage seems good and my audio reports are a bit tinny but perfectly readable. Apparently there is a mic mod to cure the tinny-ness.

Despite it's shortcomings, this is a lot of radio for the price, and I think an excellent value. Hopefully the next generation of Chinese radios will be even better, or Japan radio prices will come down, or both. Either way it's a win for ham radio operators.

Update: 2012-07-23

I have not been able to get the programming software to work on Linux. The Wine list suggests there is a bug in the kernel module for the particular USB serial chip. I tried applying the patch and rebuilding the module, to no avail.

I have been using the FM broadcast receive feature, and I discovered quite by accident that the radio keeps monitoring your ham channel, and automatically cuts over to it on activity. So you can listen to music and monitor the repeater at the same time! That's pretty cool.

Update: 2014-01-11

I have been able to program the rig with my Linux box using the latest snapshot of CHIRP. As of this writing, the version of CHIRP bundled with Linux Mint is too old to support the TYT, so you need to build from sources. http://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Home