Kenwood TH-D74Discontinued

Tri-band D-STAR and APRS handheld with all-mode wideband receive.

Why You Can't Buy One New

The TH-D74 is discontinued, and the reason is a good story. In the third week of October 2020 a fire broke out at an Asahi Kasei Microdevices (AKM) semiconductor plant in Nobeoka, Japan. It burned for roughly 82 hours and destroyed the line that produced the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converter chips that sit at the heart of nearly every digital-voice handheld. With no source for those parts and no quick second source, the radios that depended on them simply couldn't be built anymore.

On December 24, 2020, Kenwood announced the end of production for the TH-D74 — and in the same breath, for the dual-band TH-D72. Both radios were killed by the same fire on the same day. (It's also why Icom delayed the ID-52.) That left Kenwood with no dual-band amateur handheld in its catalog at all.

The drought lasted more than four years. Kenwood didn't ship a successor until the TH-D75 arrived in January 2025. The D75 is the direct descendant of this radio: same tri-band transmit, same D-STAR and APRS, same wideband all-mode receiver, now with USB-C charging, longer memory names, and a refreshed display. If you already own a D74 in good shape, you're holding a radio that was excellent enough that its replacement took half a decade and changed surprisingly little.