Upgraded from my crappy Baofeng to a Kenwood TH-D72A. This thing has automatic APRS beaconing built in. No more manually keying up packets on the trail like some kind of caveman.
Took it out to Snow Lake this weekend for a test run. I had everything configured. Tested it at home. Ready to go.
Obviously, I didn’t have everything configured.
Halfway through the hike I noticed… nothing was transmitting. Great. Did some troubleshooting on the trail (as one does) and discovered that if I manually tuned to the APRS frequency, the radio would beacon just fine. But if I used a memory channel? Nothing.
Turns out it’s a bug in Chirp. The software I used to program the radio doesn’t set some flag correctly, and the radio just… doesn’t beacon when you’re on a memory channel.
Cool. Cool cool cool.
At least now I know. And knowing is half the battle. The other half is apparently filing bug reports and waiting.