This order makes sense to me. Naturally, if you try to download before turning on the radio it's not going to work. The only thing that surprises me is rebooting the computer.
Unfortuantely, now it will not connect at all. More below.
This will only make a difference if your USB-serial cable is misbehaving. You might look into that to make sure you have it installed in accordance with the instructions from the manufacturer. Even better, use a real serial port so you're not fighting with drivers.
I believe the adapter may be at fault, seeing as now it won't connect, AT ALL. Using a dedicated serial port is not an option, I don't own a single computer that has one!
Doesn't this happen in the background? You should be able to edit your 20 channels while Chirp continues to check the rest of the radio for data.
Maybe so, but it was so flaky I didn't want to "interupt" it. I got errors when trying to do anything while it was downloading the empty channel info.
Look for clues in your debug log.
see below, all I can guess is adapter is junk. I'll see if there are any checks I can perform on it and the kenwood cable
[2016-12-29 17:15:27,662] chirp.ui.mainapp - DEBUG: User selected Kenwood TM-D710G on port /dev/ttyUSB0 Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/chirp/ui/mainapp.py", line 1432, in mh self.do_download(*args) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/chirp/ui/mainapp.py", line 683, in do_download timeout=0.25) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/serial/serialutil.py", line 180, in __init__ self.open() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/serial/serialposix.py", line 311, in open self._update_dtr_state() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/serial/serialposix.py", line 605, in _update_dtr_state fcntl.ioctl(self.fd, TIOCMBIS, TIOCM_DTR_str) IOError: [Errno 5] Input/output error