Kenwood TH-D75A Portable HF & Scan/Squelch Wants

Kenwood TH-D75A Portable HF & Scan/Squelch Wants Demonstrating portable HF reception on the Kenwood TH-D75A using an old Diamond SRH940 6m/2m/440 portable antenna. I don't think they make them anymore. I went for a walk around sunset to an RF quiet area, as I know residential noise levels kill any chance of receiving HF on this open-front-end radio. I honestly didn't expect to hear as much as I did. Conditions today were pretty good, but not having much for an antenna my hopes were not high. It did much better than expected. On my ATAS-120A tuned to a band of interest it does pretty good (in a no man-made noise location). I would add SSB frequencies to my scan if the squelch for SSB was minimum 1, and not 3 like it is now. At a setting of 3 the FM reception is impacted. That is tight for FM, and would limit range. Scan delay on Carrier scanning is not working normally. It doesn't reset the timer when activity picks back up (normal scanner behavior) and starts scanning after the delay period reaches its end. That needs to be fixed. The "Scan Auto Backlight" feature (when operating on battery or USB power) has a short 2 second period, then goes dark again. This is not enough time to turn your head to see what the scan stopped on! We need additional options for maybe 5 seconds to 10 seconds. Yes, it will use more battery, but that should be our choice. I would like to see the D-STAR pop-up work on Scan, like Icom does. I would also like to see the screen with distance and heading information as a setting choice. (same with APRS [Page 3]) Both APRS and D-STAR pop-up backlights need to stay on for the duration of the pop-up, and not stay on for the time set on the normal Backlight Timer. As far as "locking out" pesky channels during Scan, I use the only option Kenwood gave us. PF2 is set to Lockout. It works in Memory Scan with a quick PF2 button push, and I believe it also works with Group Link Scan, but doesn't work with D-STAR Nearby Repeater scanning. The only option with that is Menu 210 and navigate down to the region where the offending repeater resides, then scroll the list to find it and hit the A/B button to lock it out. That is way too much work "on the fly". Ideally I would like to see a Temporary Lockout option for all scan modes that restores skipped channels by powering the radio OFF and ON again. Scan OFF/ON might not work when you TX and start scan again...or accidentally knock it out of scan. Of course a "Restore Temporary Lockout" could be a long press on the PF key. Anything is possible, but should be a single action without diving into menus. I also talk about checking frequency accuracy with WWV and my desire to be able to calibrate the frequency "dead on". I do not know of any way to do that. It would be nice! Overall, this radio is great. It fills the void in my mobile, where I needed 220 MHz, D-STAR, WX Alert (running in the background) and a better APRS option than my FTX-1. The added bands and modes for outdoor hiking and camping are a real bonus. Too bad nobody makes amplifiers for portables anymore. What happened to Mirage and RF Concepts? A nice 60W triband amp would boost my mobile range. As far as the TM-D750A in my car, that is a lot of coin...and not in-stock anywhere (odd). I was surprised that radio, which looks a lot like the TH-D75A, does not have the HF/6m band reception, or the USB/LSB/CW capability (might have to recheck that in the manual). But this handheld does more. That is sometimes nice to have. Anyway, it's a keeper. With a few improvements it would be perfect.