Dan Langhout
Well Known Member
Me and a buddy of mine both just bought A210's from Spruce East this week. Icom tech support told me that radios that had the firmware update to make the DualWatch feature be priority channel based would have an additional "Priority" menu item in them right after the "DW Interval" menu item. We both checked our radios and were initially disappointed that the menu item was not there and the DualWatch DID NOT function priority based. ![Frown :( :(](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
HOWEVER - I discovered (by accident) that after I did a "MEM CLEAR" - "ALL" to initialize my radio back to "factory defaults", that now the priority based DualWatch function was there! The new menu item showed up and the priority channel works just great (tried it with approach control on the primary and a weather channel on the secondary).![Big grin :D :D](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
After this discovery, we did the same thing to my buddy's radio and it showed up on his as well - so it was not just some oddity with my unit.
It would appear that at least some of the radios shipped out to distributors may have an issue where they have the new firmware but the radio isn't using it until a reset is done. It turned out that our two radios are sequential serial numbers (we must have punched the "order" button at the same time) so maybe it was just a certain batch than ended up this way.
ANYWAY - I just wanted to pass this little tidbit along in case anyone else ran into it.
HOWEVER - I discovered (by accident) that after I did a "MEM CLEAR" - "ALL" to initialize my radio back to "factory defaults", that now the priority based DualWatch function was there! The new menu item showed up and the priority channel works just great (tried it with approach control on the primary and a weather channel on the secondary).
After this discovery, we did the same thing to my buddy's radio and it showed up on his as well - so it was not just some oddity with my unit.
It would appear that at least some of the radios shipped out to distributors may have an issue where they have the new firmware but the radio isn't using it until a reset is done. It turned out that our two radios are sequential serial numbers (we must have punched the "order" button at the same time) so maybe it was just a certain batch than ended up this way.
ANYWAY - I just wanted to pass this little tidbit along in case anyone else ran into it.