How to Program a Repeater into the TIDRADIO H9

The H9 is not the H8

If you have followed an H8 guide on an H9 and nothing worked, this is why. The H8 uses one flat list of numbered menu items. The H9 splits everything into two separate menus, and both start numbering at 1. Every screenshot below was photographed on an actual TIDRADIO H9.

Watch it first

The whole sequence in under a minute. The written steps below match it screen for screen.

You need six values before you start. Look your repeater up on RepeaterBook.com, or check your local club's site — they publish theirs. The example below is the Stone Mountain machine in Georgia; substitute your own.

Settings

The menu items run in order, so you scroll down Program Chann once, top to bottom, and never go back up. One thing the radio does not tell you: after you highlight a value, press MENU to commit it. BACK leaves without saving. If a setting will not stick, that is almost always why.

• Check SET-D first. Wrong offset direction is far and away the most common cause.
• Then the tone. It must be CTCSS, and it must match the published value exactly.
• Then the offset amount. 0.600 MHz on 2 metres, 5.000 MHz on 70 cm.
• Then confirm you actually saved. If you never saw Save OK, it is not stored.
• If you can hear the repeater but cannot open it, the fault is almost always tone or direction — receive works without either of them.

These live in Radio Setting, not Program Chann, and they apply to the whole radio rather than one channel. Item 1, Squelch LV — Level 1 opens for weak signals without leaving you in constant hiss. Item 2, Step Freq — 5.0K suits most 2 metre repeater spacing. Item 5, TOT — the time-out timer. 180 seconds is a courteous default and stops you holding the repeater open by accident.

Two pages. The first is a settings card with a blank column to fill in your own repeater. The second is the step-by-step with a photo of every screen. Print it, fill it in, keep it in the bag.

Page 1 — what to set, with a blank column for your own repeater.

Page 2 — every step, with the actual screen you should be looking at.

Download both pages as a PDF

Print-ready, US Letter, two pages.

TIDRADIO publish their own manual for the TD-H9. It covers the menus this guide skips — APRS, GPS, spectrum, Bluetooth programming and the full CTCSS table. Worth having, though it is written as a reference rather than a walkthrough, which is the gap this page fills.

TIDRADIO manual downloads (official)

TIDRADIO emails the file to you. Choose the TD-H9 ham version.

TD-H9 user manual on ManualsLib

Readable in the browser if you would rather not hand over an email address.

Doing this more than once?

Front-panel programming is fine for one repeater. For twenty, build your list in Radio Memory Manager and load it with CHIRP or ODmaster in one pass. Free with a HamCompass account, and your list stays saved.