I recently acquired my Technician amateur radio license, and like many folks my first radio purchase was a Baofeng UV-5R. Due to its low cost, this is a very popular radio, and there is excellent open source software available for programming it in the form of the CHIRP project. After futzing around with the UV-5R for a while, I wanted to get something a little nicer for use at home, so I purchased a Kenwood TM-V71A. CHIRP claims to have support for this radio as well, but it turns out it’s not very good: it uses a “live” connection so every time you edit a channel it tries to update the radio. This result in a slow and flaky UI, especially when trying to make bulk changes (like relocating a block of channels). I ended up using Kenwood’s official MCP-2A software running on a Windows guest on my system, which works but isn’t ideal. I decided to learn more about how the radio interacts with the computer to see if I could improve the situation.