Kenwood TM-D710A reviews

Great bunch of tweaking features, great RX sensitivity, great TX audio quality, are its perks, but its jerks keep me from rating this a "5.0". I bought this rig with the known TOKO filter problem where the filter's RF connection are tied to a DC voltage resulting in corrosion of dissimilar metals. Kenwood doesn't acknowledge this as a problem, but must have know about it since DC blocking CAP's were added to production models made from 2009 onwards. (You will have to look up the serial numbers too of when they did that, and there's a Yahoo Group on this rig that talks about this.) Unfortunately, the fix for yourself, if you do have a rig made prior to 2009, is not an easy one due to SMT technology to get around here. Other than that, neat hidden menus to fine tweak feature, like powers. Don't tweak the low power below 2W, since the finals are not biased for that, but you can go lower than the 5W preset. You can tweak above 50W on both VHF / UHF, but I wouldn't recommend that since this rig is power hungry enough. On RX this rig does draw over 1A, so in you car keep that in mind while monitoring with this rig on with engine off. Another neat RX tweak is it can monitor the 222MHz band. No TX there, but nice to RX a 222MHz repeater in the area. Never tried the APRS features, but folks do rave about it. So, if you can find this rig and know that it already has those DC blocking CAP's added to the TOKO filters, then this rig is well worth it, but if not, don't bother. (Do your serial numbers and date research.)

The Kenwood TM-D710 is my favorite mobile radio. I use it for APRS, and for 2 meter and 70 centimeter FM voice.

It has a long list of ever improving APRS features, most of which have improved functionality over the TM-D700 it replaced. It is still not the most ergonomic rig on the market, but it is an improvement over the D700 in that category too.

It is on the expensive side, and a lot of hams that aren't into APRS probably wouldn't opt for this rig. One good non APRS feature of this radio is that it can display both the frequency and the memory label on each side of the radio.