October 10, 2025 • 17 mins
Discover the Lab599 Discovery TX-500MP Ham Radio in our latest YouTube video! This compact, rugged manpack transceiver offers 160-6 meter coverage, 10W output, and advanced features like auto-notch, noise reduction, and a built-in antenna tuner. Perfect for portable operations, POTA, and off-grid adventures. Watch our in-depth review and see it in action! #HamRadio #Lab599 #TX600MP #qrp
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Today's video is sponsored by M&P Coax - save 10% off of all coax products with code HR2CABLES at this link - https://hr2.li/cables
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the newest offering from Lab five nine nine,
the TX five hundred m p HF plus six meter radio.
Just pick this up. We're going to talk about it today,
all right, from Lab five nine nine t X five
hundred mp. This is the one that I was talking
about in my video when I did my video about
(00:21):
the TX one thousand that they announced a while back.
If you go to Lab five nine to nine's website,
they talked they announced a new radio, and I did
a video about it, and I was like, but nobody's
seen this radio yet. They announced this radio like last year,
year and a half ago, something like that, and they
had a link to the Desert Wireless website for where
(00:42):
to purchase this radio, but it wasn't there. In fact,
at the time of this recording, it's still not there. Okay,
this is where I got it. I got this radio
from Desert Wireless. Okay, I bought it. I paid full
price for it. This is all. If we go to
all on here, click on all all this stuff down here,
and then click on transceivers, and they have the original
(01:05):
TX five hundred right there, and they have a couple
of Sun SDR Expert Electronics radios right there, but no
TX five hundred MP. So for whatever reason they decide
to take the radio off of the website when it's
out of stock. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me,
but that's how they do it. So I had emailed
(01:27):
them shortly after because Julian Oh eight STN he started
making videos about this radio a while back, few months ago.
So I'm like, I know it's out, and I got
a couple of comments from you guys in the TX
one thousand videos saying, oh, yeah, it's out. It's out.
You can buy it from Desert Wireless. It's out, And
I'm like, dude, it's not on their website. How are
you buying it from them? So Robert W five ITR
(01:48):
put a feeler out on their website and said change,
you know, send me an email notification when something new
appears on this website or something. Kind of did his
own thing, and when we were on our Colorado trip
in July twenty twenty five, he got an email notification,
so he went and bought one, and I'm like, okay,
go ahead and buy me one two. I was driving
at the time, handing my credit card. So so far,
no fraudulent charges. From Robert on the credit card, so
(02:09):
I think he's a pretty good guy. But I picked
this up, got an email from them the next day.
They said it with ship in twenty four hours. It
actually took about three days and ship got here in
just a couple more days after that, So everything's good.
Looking forward to trying this out. I'm gonna take this
to Galveston next month when we're down there for the
Labor Day weekend. But today we're gonna kind of look
at it and see what all it's about. I'm gonna
(02:32):
go through the menus on it. This is basically from
what I've seen so far, this is the same radio
as the original t X five hundred. It's just instead
of having the screen horizontally here, it has the screen
ninety degrees rotated here. So you set it up like this,
and then the battery is built into it. This LAB
five nine to nine battery is built into it. This
(02:54):
thing has a kickstand right here. You can kickstand it
out like that, and you can set it on the
desk like that, turn the battery on right there. We
give a power indicator light right there, and it is
USBC rechargeable. The port for the USBC is right here
you can actually get it doesn't come it comes with
a nice USBC cable, but you can also charge it
(03:15):
via barrel connector. It does not come with a barrel connector,
but it does come with the USBC cable. I just
charged mine via USBC cable and charge it from my
Gigabarts battery box with the sixty five hypd port. Charge
it up just fine. It was about probably three quarters
of the charge when I got it, so it wasn't
that far down. But I plugged it in, charge it up,
let it go overnight and put it back together and
(03:35):
got it ready for the video to make today. So
let's go through the menu on this thing first. A
couple of things about the radio itself. MP stands for Manpack.
The t X five hundred man Pack MP man pack
is a compact portable HF and six meter radio on
the box and on the manual. I'll show you the
manual here in a minute. On the manual here it
says HF slash VHF l so VHF low band. I
(03:59):
was wondering if it had two meters, but it does not.
It has HF and six meters. So right here portable
HF and six meter QRP transiver designed for rugged field
based amage radio operations, et cetera, et cetera. Frequency coverage
is zero point five to fifty six megaherts, so it
goes a little bit past the six meter band. It
transmits from one to thirty megahertz with the tuner and
forty five to fifty six megahertz. Not sure if it
(04:21):
has an internal tuner or not. Oh, you know what,
I need to keep reading built in automatic A to you.
There we go. So the t X five hundred did
not have an A tou Okay. Now, for those of
us using in fed halfwaves and resonant antennas, that doesn't
really matter. My newest antenna that I really like using
on my PoTA activations is that little pro HP seven
hundred and fifty watts on sideband tar heel antenna. I've
(04:44):
had very good success with that antenna. You tune it
to whatever band you want. It's got an electronic motor
on it. Just plug it into your battery and use
the toggle switch to go up and down with the coil.
It works great. So I don't typically care about whether
a radio has an ATU because I tend to use
resonant antennas, but I know some people want to use
(05:08):
a random wire or they want to be able to
tune down a little bit further, and that's okay. So,
but this one does have a built in ATU. It
supports all modes single sideband CW digital modes like ftaight, JSX,
call in win link okay, low power consumption up to
one hundred milli amps in received mode, enabling extended battery
life with the BP five to fifty battery pack. That's
(05:29):
the battery pack that's built on the back of this
right here. Three watt nominal external nominal for external speaker.
I'm going to talk more about the external speaker here
in a minute. Digital mode support CAMPATITAL with interfaces like
the Link five hundred MP. We had Oliver and Ed
on a live stream a while back to talk about
the Link five hundred for the original t X five
hundred radio. They've got a Link five hundred specifically for
(05:49):
this model that sits on top of the radio right
now too. So maybe they'll be kind enough to send
me one of these one days and we'll have them
on a live stream again. But right now, I don't
have that the forum factor is Manpac designed. It weighs
about one point eight kilograms with the battery pack and cells.
Compact and rudded rugged aviation grade aluminum alloy housing. Engineering
(06:09):
for harsh conditions, high contrasts, sunlit readable monochrome LCD display.
I have not had this thing out in really bright
sunlight yet, but you can tell by looking at it
it's gonna it should be pretty easy to read in
the sun. Improved wire management connectors consolidated to one side. Yep,
we're gonna look at that here in a minute. Connectors
is the GX twelve millimeter connectors for watertight connection Standard
(06:30):
BNC and Connectenet connector. No built in speaker. It does
not have a built in speaker. It comes with this
speaker microphone. I'll show you that in a minute, but
it does not have a built in speaker. Enhancements over
the t X five hundred wire management Manpac design Digital
Interface optional Link five hundred MP. Now they have a
link five hundred for the original TX five hundred as well. Okay,
(06:51):
they got a couple versions of it. Actually, they've got
one where you take the battery and the sixty wide
amplifier and put them all in like this three D
printed case. The LINK hundred kind of fits nicely in
there to where you don't have a bunch of chords
running everywhere. So they have that option available for the
TX five hundred, So I wouldn't say that that's something
this radio has over that one. But it does have
a built in ATU unlike the original TX five hundred
(07:14):
for easier antenna matching. Okay, good limitations and considerations. No
full break in QSK like the TX five hundred. It
may have a minimum of one hundred milliseconds recovery time
in CW mode, limiting high speed CW operation. No VFO knobs.
Took me a minute to figure out how to do
VFO on this radio. Gonna show you that a minute
external audio dependency no built in speaker, relies on speaker
(07:35):
minor eternal audio. Yeah, I thought that was a drawback too.
Limited information. Some features like spectral display and USPC integration
are not fully detailed as of the latest updates. We're
going to take this thing. This is a pretty good
quick start guide right here. I read through this. I
had to consult this quick start guide to figure out
how to do a couple of things in it because
(07:57):
it was not blatantly obvious to get into some menus,
how to get into some modes. The battery to turn
off by itself if you don't use it for a while.
So there's the display right there. So we've got the mic,
speaker port up here, data port, and the antenna port
right there. So on the top of the radio it's
got these funkified connectors like the old one had. This
(08:18):
is a straight being. Actually this is a This is
a type in connector right here. They say it says
B and C on the paperwork, but it's not. This
is a type in connector. And these two ports have
different number of pins in them, so you can't put
one in the other. This is the data port which
goes right here, but you can't put it in the
speaker mic because the number of pins is different. Likewise,
(08:39):
the speaker microphone the end of the speaker microphone here
has a certain number of pins just like that, so
you can't intermatch the two. I like that. It makes it.
It makes it a little bit more proprietary, so you
can't plug stuff into the wrong place. Yeah, this type
in connector is a little strange for an HF radio.
But that's what it is, is a type in connector. Okay,
this is obviously the power button right here. These are
(09:01):
function not function one, two and three. That's the menu
left right up down and these are three channel zero,
channel one and channel two. You can custom program those channels.
So if you want to always be able to get
back to fourteen oh seven to four, which of course
is the FT eight frequency for twenty meters, you can
do that. Or you want to program something else in
their program a six meter repeater or it does have CTCSS.
(09:22):
I'll show you that in a second. So in order
to get into the menu, so we got menu there
and it shows you some stuff down at the bottom
of the screen. Zero zero power is what that one
says right there, and we can page through the menu
with these left right keys. Zero zero'shere it starts zero
one is RF is CW zero two is might gain
(09:43):
you page through the menus four five, six seven. Compression
enabled if you want to change that. Compression is enabled
right now. If you want to change it, you hit
the updown arrows. You can disable that. You can re
enable that. However, you want to press menu to get
out of it like there, and then it go all
the way up to starts at zero zero, and it
goes all the way up to thirty six CAT control
(10:05):
TS two thousand CAT protocol rather TS two thousand. Interesting,
it says CAT Protocol TS two thousand. So but that's
the menu right there. Hit menu to get back out
of it. And then along the bottom here it says volume, frequency,
and tune right there, so you got your tuner right there.
But you can page this sub menu also if you
(10:26):
push left right, it changes these bottom three options here.
So now it says filter, pre amp, and mode. If
we're going to mode. We're in digital mode right there
over on the left you can see, and if we're
going to mode, it highlights the mode and then you
can change the mode CWR AM FM upper sideban lower sideband,
(10:49):
CW regular, CWR back to digital. So that's how you
do that. So you would change that, come back out
of that, go back over to the right again. We've
got squelch, channel and battery on that menu there, and
then we've got MAG one and MAG two. I haven't
figured out with the MAG one. In MAG two, there's
some relay you can hear clicking in the radio when
(11:09):
you click on mag one and my two. I didn't
look that up in the manual, so I'm not sure
exactly what that does yet. And then you can lock
the screen if you want to. You can lock the
screen there, unlock it with another one. And of course
that's your tune button right there. So it's got all
of that stuff in the menus, and it's got this
menu that constantly stays up. And then in order to
go into the deep menu for more detailed settings, you
(11:32):
just click on the menu button and go right there.
However you want to key beep is enabled. See, you
can't hear anything right now because there's no speaker plugged
into it. That is a drawback to it, in my opinion.
It is a drawback that it does not have a
speaker built into the radio. So we have to go
here and now now I can hear it. But I'm
(11:55):
gonna plug in. There we go. Now we can really
hear it. The inte there was no in ten of
plugged in, so I'm plugging in an antenda. I've got
a monstrosity here because I went from type in on
the radio to B and C, B and C to
so two thirty nine and then my co acts here
with the so SO two thirty nine connector. Now for this video,
and when I take this into the field, I will
(12:16):
be using Mezzi and Polony Coax. This is the Mezzi
and Ploony Coax Sahara Edition Coax. You can always save
a ten percent discount on everything from Messi and Ploni
with the coupon code of HR two cables at the
gigabarts link in the description BLOW. They're sponsoring this video
when I take this thing out to the field at
Labor Day and hopefully do a PODA activation with it.
(12:36):
Maybe I'll do fta PoTA activation with it. But I
don't know about using QRP. I'm just not a big
QRP guy. But when I connect this to and intenna,
I will be using Mezzi and Ploony Coax. So check
out the link in the description BLOW and thank you
Mezzia Plony for supporting the channel. So now we've got
this plugged up and we're gonna page over here to
this menu that says volume right there. Volume menu right there,
(12:59):
so we click on that and then we can turn
and the volume meter is this bottom meter right here.
This is your S meter. The top meter is the
S meter. The bottom meter is the volume meter. So
you can hear that there's FT eight activity going on
right now on the twenty meter band with the external
antenna connecting just the band. It's just it's not a
(13:19):
radio thing. This is just how the band is. But
the band is just not up right now at all.
It also comes with this comes with this cable right
here that plugs into the data port. Actually, this guy
right here, this guy right here plugs into the data
port on the radio. This is how many pins are
on the data port on the radio. So this goes
in the middle of the radio right here, just like that.
(13:39):
Out of this comes an external speaker plug. So this
data port has three items coming out of it. One look,
this looks like an external speaker plug, but it might
be for that might be for USB interface. I'm not sure.
It has this plug on it, which is where this
plugs in. So in order to interface USB, you have
(14:01):
to go through this plug on the radio into this
external plug here, into this barrel connector or this uh yeah,
this barrel connector and a USB a connector. The third
part that comes out of the top of the data
cable is this red and black cable and this has
I'm not sure exactly what this is for. Honestly, this
is the way it came. It came with this cable here,
(14:23):
so this goes into the data cable of the radio,
and then it's got three options. This is a USB
interface option. This is it's not marked, but I'm sure
it's probably in the manual. But I thought that that
was strange because it's almost like it could run on
external power. Maybe that is what it's for. Maybe it's
to run on external power. If you don't want to
use the internal battery, you can use external power connect
(14:45):
that to your power. That makes sense. I don't know
how you would interface it with the amplifier if you
wanted to get more than ten watts out of it.
Kind of a weird contraption, but this gets around the
original TX five hundred, which had three ports on one
side and three ports on the other side. So you
have this monstrosity looking bord thing that would come out
of it. So that cleans it up a little bit,
(15:07):
puts it a little bit more, makes it a little
bit more user friendly. You just got to deal with
this one set of triple cables going into the data
port there and then a type in connector on the
top for some reason. But that is the TX five
hundred MP, and I'm looking forward to using this quite frankly,
I think it's definitely very compact. It's definitely compact. It
(15:32):
is more portable than its predecessor because you don't have
to add a lot of it. You just don't have
to add as much stuff to it. It's got an
internal tuner, which the original TX five hundred did not have.
So what do you guys think? I'll put a link
down below in the description for Desert Wireless. One quick
thing about Desert Wireless. After I did that TX one
(15:53):
thousand video as some of the new coffee I have
on my website. After I did that TX one thousand video,
people commented in that video saying, yeah, it's on the
Desert Wireless website. They just don't list it when it's
out of stock. Why not just list it and say
out of stock? So I emailed Desert Wireless and I said, hey,
look here's my YouTube channel. I'm not asking you for anything.
(16:14):
I want to buy a radio when you have it
back in stock. Can you let me know when you
think that might be or can you let me know
when they come back in and silence, nothing, no response
at all, so not real sure about their customer service.
All they could have responded said no, we don't have
a way to do that, thanks for looking okay, at
least that would have been a response. But after ordering it,
(16:36):
they shipped it very quickly. I had it in less
than a week from the time I ordered it to
the time it was deliver each I had it in
less than a week, so very fast shipping. It was
in stock, I bought it, they shipped it. Everything's good.
The packaging was good, no problems there. But I'm looking
forward to using this in the field, seeing what it
sounds like, seeing what kind of ftaight we can do
with it. I might trying to do a couple of
(16:56):
sideband contacts on ten watts. Let me know what you
think about this. Check the links in the description below.
Seventy three guys, thanks for watching it.
This is the newest offering from Lab five nine nine,
the TX five hundred m p HF plus six meter radio.
Just pick this up. We're going to talk about it today,
all right, from Lab five nine nine t X five
hundred mp. This is the one that I was talking
about in my video when I did my video about
(00:21):
the TX one thousand that they announced a while back.
If you go to Lab five nine to nine's website,
they talked they announced a new radio, and I did
a video about it, and I was like, but nobody's
seen this radio yet. They announced this radio like last year,
year and a half ago, something like that, and they
had a link to the Desert Wireless website for where
(00:42):
to purchase this radio, but it wasn't there. In fact,
at the time of this recording, it's still not there. Okay,
this is where I got it. I got this radio
from Desert Wireless. Okay, I bought it. I paid full
price for it. This is all. If we go to
all on here, click on all all this stuff down here,
and then click on transceivers, and they have the original
(01:05):
TX five hundred right there, and they have a couple
of Sun SDR Expert Electronics radios right there, but no
TX five hundred MP. So for whatever reason they decide
to take the radio off of the website when it's
out of stock. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me,
but that's how they do it. So I had emailed
(01:27):
them shortly after because Julian Oh eight STN he started
making videos about this radio a while back, few months ago.
So I'm like, I know it's out, and I got
a couple of comments from you guys in the TX
one thousand videos saying, oh, yeah, it's out. It's out.
You can buy it from Desert Wireless. It's out, And
I'm like, dude, it's not on their website. How are
you buying it from them? So Robert W five ITR
(01:48):
put a feeler out on their website and said change,
you know, send me an email notification when something new
appears on this website or something. Kind of did his
own thing, and when we were on our Colorado trip
in July twenty twenty five, he got an email notification,
so he went and bought one, and I'm like, okay,
go ahead and buy me one two. I was driving
at the time, handing my credit card. So so far,
no fraudulent charges. From Robert on the credit card, so
(02:09):
I think he's a pretty good guy. But I picked
this up, got an email from them the next day.
They said it with ship in twenty four hours. It
actually took about three days and ship got here in
just a couple more days after that, So everything's good.
Looking forward to trying this out. I'm gonna take this
to Galveston next month when we're down there for the
Labor Day weekend. But today we're gonna kind of look
at it and see what all it's about. I'm gonna
(02:32):
go through the menus on it. This is basically from
what I've seen so far, this is the same radio
as the original t X five hundred. It's just instead
of having the screen horizontally here, it has the screen
ninety degrees rotated here. So you set it up like this,
and then the battery is built into it. This LAB
five nine to nine battery is built into it. This
(02:54):
thing has a kickstand right here. You can kickstand it
out like that, and you can set it on the
desk like that, turn the battery on right there. We
give a power indicator light right there, and it is
USBC rechargeable. The port for the USBC is right here
you can actually get it doesn't come it comes with
a nice USBC cable, but you can also charge it
(03:15):
via barrel connector. It does not come with a barrel connector,
but it does come with the USBC cable. I just
charged mine via USBC cable and charge it from my
Gigabarts battery box with the sixty five hypd port. Charge
it up just fine. It was about probably three quarters
of the charge when I got it, so it wasn't
that far down. But I plugged it in, charge it up,
let it go overnight and put it back together and
(03:35):
got it ready for the video to make today. So
let's go through the menu on this thing first. A
couple of things about the radio itself. MP stands for Manpack.
The t X five hundred man Pack MP man pack
is a compact portable HF and six meter radio on
the box and on the manual. I'll show you the
manual here in a minute. On the manual here it
says HF slash VHF l so VHF low band. I
(03:59):
was wondering if it had two meters, but it does not.
It has HF and six meters. So right here portable
HF and six meter QRP transiver designed for rugged field
based amage radio operations, et cetera, et cetera. Frequency coverage
is zero point five to fifty six megaherts, so it
goes a little bit past the six meter band. It
transmits from one to thirty megahertz with the tuner and
forty five to fifty six megahertz. Not sure if it
(04:21):
has an internal tuner or not. Oh, you know what,
I need to keep reading built in automatic A to you.
There we go. So the t X five hundred did
not have an A tou Okay. Now, for those of
us using in fed halfwaves and resonant antennas, that doesn't
really matter. My newest antenna that I really like using
on my PoTA activations is that little pro HP seven
hundred and fifty watts on sideband tar heel antenna. I've
(04:44):
had very good success with that antenna. You tune it
to whatever band you want. It's got an electronic motor
on it. Just plug it into your battery and use
the toggle switch to go up and down with the coil.
It works great. So I don't typically care about whether
a radio has an ATU because I tend to use
resonant antennas, but I know some people want to use
(05:08):
a random wire or they want to be able to
tune down a little bit further, and that's okay. So,
but this one does have a built in ATU. It
supports all modes single sideband CW digital modes like ftaight, JSX,
call in win link okay, low power consumption up to
one hundred milli amps in received mode, enabling extended battery
life with the BP five to fifty battery pack. That's
(05:29):
the battery pack that's built on the back of this
right here. Three watt nominal external nominal for external speaker.
I'm going to talk more about the external speaker here
in a minute. Digital mode support CAMPATITAL with interfaces like
the Link five hundred MP. We had Oliver and Ed
on a live stream a while back to talk about
the Link five hundred for the original t X five
hundred radio. They've got a Link five hundred specifically for
(05:49):
this model that sits on top of the radio right
now too. So maybe they'll be kind enough to send
me one of these one days and we'll have them
on a live stream again. But right now, I don't
have that the forum factor is Manpac designed. It weighs
about one point eight kilograms with the battery pack and cells.
Compact and rudded rugged aviation grade aluminum alloy housing. Engineering
(06:09):
for harsh conditions, high contrasts, sunlit readable monochrome LCD display.
I have not had this thing out in really bright
sunlight yet, but you can tell by looking at it
it's gonna it should be pretty easy to read in
the sun. Improved wire management connectors consolidated to one side. Yep,
we're gonna look at that here in a minute. Connectors
is the GX twelve millimeter connectors for watertight connection Standard
(06:30):
BNC and Connectenet connector. No built in speaker. It does
not have a built in speaker. It comes with this
speaker microphone. I'll show you that in a minute, but
it does not have a built in speaker. Enhancements over
the t X five hundred wire management Manpac design Digital
Interface optional Link five hundred MP. Now they have a
link five hundred for the original TX five hundred as well. Okay,
(06:51):
they got a couple versions of it. Actually, they've got
one where you take the battery and the sixty wide
amplifier and put them all in like this three D
printed case. The LINK hundred kind of fits nicely in
there to where you don't have a bunch of chords
running everywhere. So they have that option available for the
TX five hundred, So I wouldn't say that that's something
this radio has over that one. But it does have
a built in ATU unlike the original TX five hundred
(07:14):
for easier antenna matching. Okay, good limitations and considerations. No
full break in QSK like the TX five hundred. It
may have a minimum of one hundred milliseconds recovery time
in CW mode, limiting high speed CW operation. No VFO knobs.
Took me a minute to figure out how to do
VFO on this radio. Gonna show you that a minute
external audio dependency no built in speaker, relies on speaker
(07:35):
minor eternal audio. Yeah, I thought that was a drawback too.
Limited information. Some features like spectral display and USPC integration
are not fully detailed as of the latest updates. We're
going to take this thing. This is a pretty good
quick start guide right here. I read through this. I
had to consult this quick start guide to figure out
how to do a couple of things in it because
(07:57):
it was not blatantly obvious to get into some menus,
how to get into some modes. The battery to turn
off by itself if you don't use it for a while.
So there's the display right there. So we've got the mic,
speaker port up here, data port, and the antenna port
right there. So on the top of the radio it's
got these funkified connectors like the old one had. This
(08:18):
is a straight being. Actually this is a This is
a type in connector right here. They say it says
B and C on the paperwork, but it's not. This
is a type in connector. And these two ports have
different number of pins in them, so you can't put
one in the other. This is the data port which
goes right here, but you can't put it in the
speaker mic because the number of pins is different. Likewise,
(08:39):
the speaker microphone the end of the speaker microphone here
has a certain number of pins just like that, so
you can't intermatch the two. I like that. It makes it.
It makes it a little bit more proprietary, so you
can't plug stuff into the wrong place. Yeah, this type
in connector is a little strange for an HF radio.
But that's what it is, is a type in connector. Okay,
this is obviously the power button right here. These are
(09:01):
function not function one, two and three. That's the menu
left right up down and these are three channel zero,
channel one and channel two. You can custom program those channels.
So if you want to always be able to get
back to fourteen oh seven to four, which of course
is the FT eight frequency for twenty meters, you can
do that. Or you want to program something else in
their program a six meter repeater or it does have CTCSS.
(09:22):
I'll show you that in a second. So in order
to get into the menu, so we got menu there
and it shows you some stuff down at the bottom
of the screen. Zero zero power is what that one
says right there, and we can page through the menu
with these left right keys. Zero zero'shere it starts zero
one is RF is CW zero two is might gain
(09:43):
you page through the menus four five, six seven. Compression
enabled if you want to change that. Compression is enabled
right now. If you want to change it, you hit
the updown arrows. You can disable that. You can re
enable that. However, you want to press menu to get
out of it like there, and then it go all
the way up to starts at zero zero, and it
goes all the way up to thirty six CAT control
(10:05):
TS two thousand CAT protocol rather TS two thousand. Interesting,
it says CAT Protocol TS two thousand. So but that's
the menu right there. Hit menu to get back out
of it. And then along the bottom here it says volume, frequency,
and tune right there, so you got your tuner right there.
But you can page this sub menu also if you
(10:26):
push left right, it changes these bottom three options here.
So now it says filter, pre amp, and mode. If
we're going to mode. We're in digital mode right there
over on the left you can see, and if we're
going to mode, it highlights the mode and then you
can change the mode CWR AM FM upper sideban lower sideband,
(10:49):
CW regular, CWR back to digital. So that's how you
do that. So you would change that, come back out
of that, go back over to the right again. We've
got squelch, channel and battery on that menu there, and
then we've got MAG one and MAG two. I haven't
figured out with the MAG one. In MAG two, there's
some relay you can hear clicking in the radio when
(11:09):
you click on mag one and my two. I didn't
look that up in the manual, so I'm not sure
exactly what that does yet. And then you can lock
the screen if you want to. You can lock the
screen there, unlock it with another one. And of course
that's your tune button right there. So it's got all
of that stuff in the menus, and it's got this
menu that constantly stays up. And then in order to
go into the deep menu for more detailed settings, you
(11:32):
just click on the menu button and go right there.
However you want to key beep is enabled. See, you
can't hear anything right now because there's no speaker plugged
into it. That is a drawback to it, in my opinion.
It is a drawback that it does not have a
speaker built into the radio. So we have to go
here and now now I can hear it. But I'm
(11:55):
gonna plug in. There we go. Now we can really
hear it. The inte there was no in ten of
plugged in, so I'm plugging in an antenda. I've got
a monstrosity here because I went from type in on
the radio to B and C, B and C to
so two thirty nine and then my co acts here
with the so SO two thirty nine connector. Now for this video,
and when I take this into the field, I will
(12:16):
be using Mezzi and Polony Coax. This is the Mezzi
and Ploony Coax Sahara Edition Coax. You can always save
a ten percent discount on everything from Messi and Ploni
with the coupon code of HR two cables at the
gigabarts link in the description BLOW. They're sponsoring this video
when I take this thing out to the field at
Labor Day and hopefully do a PODA activation with it.
(12:36):
Maybe I'll do fta PoTA activation with it. But I
don't know about using QRP. I'm just not a big
QRP guy. But when I connect this to and intenna,
I will be using Mezzi and Ploony Coax. So check
out the link in the description BLOW and thank you
Mezzia Plony for supporting the channel. So now we've got
this plugged up and we're gonna page over here to
this menu that says volume right there. Volume menu right there,
(12:59):
so we click on that and then we can turn
and the volume meter is this bottom meter right here.
This is your S meter. The top meter is the
S meter. The bottom meter is the volume meter. So
you can hear that there's FT eight activity going on
right now on the twenty meter band with the external
antenna connecting just the band. It's just it's not a
(13:19):
radio thing. This is just how the band is. But
the band is just not up right now at all.
It also comes with this comes with this cable right
here that plugs into the data port. Actually, this guy
right here, this guy right here plugs into the data
port on the radio. This is how many pins are
on the data port on the radio. So this goes
in the middle of the radio right here, just like that.
(13:39):
Out of this comes an external speaker plug. So this
data port has three items coming out of it. One look,
this looks like an external speaker plug, but it might
be for that might be for USB interface. I'm not sure.
It has this plug on it, which is where this
plugs in. So in order to interface USB, you have
(14:01):
to go through this plug on the radio into this
external plug here, into this barrel connector or this uh yeah,
this barrel connector and a USB a connector. The third
part that comes out of the top of the data
cable is this red and black cable and this has
I'm not sure exactly what this is for. Honestly, this
is the way it came. It came with this cable here,
(14:23):
so this goes into the data cable of the radio,
and then it's got three options. This is a USB
interface option. This is it's not marked, but I'm sure
it's probably in the manual. But I thought that that
was strange because it's almost like it could run on
external power. Maybe that is what it's for. Maybe it's
to run on external power. If you don't want to
use the internal battery, you can use external power connect
(14:45):
that to your power. That makes sense. I don't know
how you would interface it with the amplifier if you
wanted to get more than ten watts out of it.
Kind of a weird contraption, but this gets around the
original TX five hundred, which had three ports on one
side and three ports on the other side. So you
have this monstrosity looking bord thing that would come out
of it. So that cleans it up a little bit,
(15:07):
puts it a little bit more, makes it a little
bit more user friendly. You just got to deal with
this one set of triple cables going into the data
port there and then a type in connector on the
top for some reason. But that is the TX five
hundred MP, and I'm looking forward to using this quite frankly,
I think it's definitely very compact. It's definitely compact. It
(15:32):
is more portable than its predecessor because you don't have
to add a lot of it. You just don't have
to add as much stuff to it. It's got an
internal tuner, which the original TX five hundred did not have.
So what do you guys think? I'll put a link
down below in the description for Desert Wireless. One quick
thing about Desert Wireless. After I did that TX one
(15:53):
thousand video as some of the new coffee I have
on my website. After I did that TX one thousand video,
people commented in that video saying, yeah, it's on the
Desert Wireless website. They just don't list it when it's
out of stock. Why not just list it and say
out of stock? So I emailed Desert Wireless and I said, hey,
look here's my YouTube channel. I'm not asking you for anything.
(16:14):
I want to buy a radio when you have it
back in stock. Can you let me know when you
think that might be or can you let me know
when they come back in and silence, nothing, no response
at all, so not real sure about their customer service.
All they could have responded said no, we don't have
a way to do that, thanks for looking okay, at
least that would have been a response. But after ordering it,
(16:36):
they shipped it very quickly. I had it in less
than a week from the time I ordered it to
the time it was deliver each I had it in
less than a week, so very fast shipping. It was
in stock, I bought it, they shipped it. Everything's good.
The packaging was good, no problems there. But I'm looking
forward to using this in the field, seeing what it
sounds like, seeing what kind of ftaight we can do
with it. I might trying to do a couple of
(16:56):
sideband contacts on ten watts. Let me know what you
think about this. Check the links in the description below.
Seventy three guys, thanks for watching it.
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