I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with my Kenwood TH-F6A over the past months, been using it more to get on the air recently. I even joined ARES, Santa Cruz County Amateur Radio Emergency Service. I’d listened to their nets occasionally over the years and after I heard Cap Pennell (KE6AFE) talking with someone about the new sign-up form, I figured I could easily both help with testing the form and get myself sign up at the same time.

But the bigger update is that I’m having radio troubles! I often am adding, changing, or re-ordering frequencies on this thing, and starting last night, my data cable is no longer working.

As I’ve mentioned previously I use MacMemoriesManager on my MacBook Air. It’s been working great all this time, but now the software keeps reporting that it can’t find the radio. First I tried a Menu Reset on the radio, then a VFO reset, and as a last resort I tried a full reset. Now I’ve got a blank radio and no way to program it via the cable!

If I get a few minutes tomorrow at lunch I’m going to try to run over to Ham Radio Outlet in Sunnyvale and see if they can take a look at it. I noticed that the double plug seemed like it was a bit firmer going in, so my guess is one of the small internal contacts inside the jack has bent out of position.