oops, naturally, right after i posted i amended my google search parameters and found bug reports #35 and #51. these reports seem to address a couple of my issues, but not why i'm seeing them if the bugs have been resolved. it does look like one bug might have been abandoned. 

is it possible some errant code crept back in after these issues were fixed?

oh, and i also found some references to those unknown columns, but no explanation of what they are. but they don't seem to be pertinent to the th6 since i found references to them in two other radios and some 'test.csv' files as well. so i'll pretend they aren't there unless i hear otherwise!

thanks, /guy (73 de kg5vt)

On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 2:50 AM, Guy Teague <accts@gtweb.org> wrote:
hi folks: i looked through the chirp site before posting this, but didn't find much specific. i see there was an issue/bug opened for the th-f6a reporting as a th-f6 and my daily build of chirp (i might be a couple of 'days' behind) reports as such, but the bug appears to have been resolved about 8-12 months ago. it was Bug #19: TH-F6A support not working in recent builds. it appears everything else (with the below exceptions) seems to work as expected, but i don't have any comparison to bump against.

anyway, the first thing i did since this radio works with chirp completely unlike any of my other radios in a sort of 'real time' mode (it almost seems like virtual control is already 95% working and i was surprised that it wasn't implemented nor was a menu config function) was to read the radio and export out to csv. but i don't understand what the last 3 columns are: | URCALL |, | RPT1CALL | and  | RPT2CALL |. granted, it's a new radio and my first kenwood in many years, but i've been through the manual pretty thoroughly twice now and did a google search as well and can't come up with any info on these columns. it could always be some function(s) that i would never use and i glossed over them.

also, on a more serious note, when i tried to import some info from one of my other radios (after formatting it for the f6a), chirp refused to process the lines that had mode as 'FMN'. at first i was surprised as i had (ass)umed that the kenwood would do narrow fm, and in fact it does support nfm, but not at the same time as regular fm--a disappointing fact but at least the mode is there to activate. i think this would be an easy fix in that i could just change all instances of NFM to FM in my csv file, but i was curious as to why chirp would not recognize this mode from this radio?

thanks! /guy (73 de kg5vt)