You can run Kenwood’s windows-only memory control software on macOS (<10.15) or linux using Wine.

homebrew wine

Important: wine no longer runs on macOS 10.15

1. install homebrew
2. brew cask install –no-quarantine wine-stable
3. brew install winetricks

Kenwood Software

My overall impression of the free Kenwood software is that it lacks interoperability and has a few bugs which will never be fixed. But, it is free to download and can run decently with wine.

• These compatibility steps will probably mostly work for linux as well, but untested.
• Other MCP versions can probably be loaded into wine in a similar way. The most important things are to use a 32-bit wine prefix and install the appropriate .NET runtime as specified in the system requirements.

MCP-2A

Kenwood’s solution for memory management on TM-V71 and TM-D710.

This guide will install MCP-2A 3.22 on macOS 10.14 using wine-5.0.

WINEPREFIX=~/kenwood/mcp-2a WINEARCH=win32 winetricks dotnet35

• Follow the steps to install .NET framework 3.5

  curl https://www.kenwood.com/i/products/info/amateur/image/M2A322.zip > ~/kenwood/M2A322.zip
  cd ~/kenwood && unzip M2A322.zip
  WINEPREFIX=~/kenwood/mcp-2a wine setup.exe
  

• Follow the steps to install MCP-2A

Serial Port

I’m using a USB to Serial adapter from Pluggable that is well known and tested. Anything that is usable from the host should probably work here.

• ln -s /dev/tty.usbserial ~/kenwood/mcp-2a/dosdevices/com1

Launch

WINEPREFIX=~/kenwood/mcp-2a wine ~/kenwood/mcp-2a/drive_c/Program\ Files/Kenwood/MCP-2A/MCP-2A.exe

Known Problems

• Copy/paste only works between instances of MCP-2A, I couldn’t paste from excel or google sheets
• Importing HMK (kenwood’s fancy CSV format) clears all receiver settings similar to factory reset
• When pasting memory rows, blanks are not saved. This is particularly annoying because the TM-V71A identifies groups by number 0-99, 100-199, 200-299, etc.

MCP-5A

Covers the TH-K20 and TH-K40 handheld transcievers.

2020-09-20 NOTE: The software runs and can read memory from the radio, however I have yet to successfully write memory back to the radio.

These steps should be considered a Work in Progress at this time and will be updated if I ever get it working.

This guide will install MCP-5A 1.10 on macOS 10.14 using wine-5.0

curl https://www.kenwood.com/i/products/info/amateur/image/M5A110.zip > ~/kenwood/M5A110.zip
cd ~/kenwood && unzip M5A110.zip
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/kenwood/mcp-5a winetricks dotnet30
WINEPREFIX=~/kenwood/mcp-5a wine M5A110/setup.exe

Serial Port

I’m using a cheap baofeng cable for this which shows up on my mac as /dev/tty.usbserial-AL0652T9

• ln -s /dev/tty.usbserial-AL0652T9 ~/kenwood/mcp-5a/dosdevices/com1

Launch

WINEPREFIX=~/kenwood/mcp-5a wine ~/kenwood/mcp-5a/drive_c/Program\ Files/Kenwood/MCP-5A/MCP-5A.exe

Known Problems

• No good way to import memory settings from CSV
• Cannot write memory to transceiver