[RocketSurgeon]

I managed to brick (and later recover) my NEXT attempting to change connection modes with a flash drive, so I have a few lessons to share. I just made a user.settings file attempting to set my NEXT back to APIPA. The correct procedure is to simply insert the drive into the icom and tap the yellow-lit button once. Since this was not working, I tried the recovery procedure of holding the button, plugging in, and giving 3 quick taps. Doing that caused all of the lights to go dead on the ICOM except for LAN. It officially became unresponsive, and attempts to recover with USB firmware were unsuccessful. It turns out the NEXT only likes certain flash drives! So my lessons are as follows:
1. The Next only gets along with certain flash drives, older is generally better. I tried my super-fast Lexar 64gb with FAT32 formatting, and it wouldn't recover. Putting the firmware files on an ancient 64MB drive fixed it in 45 seconds. I have now grabbed a couple of old USB 2.0 drives off Amazon for $4 each.
2. Changing I.P. settings only requires inserting the drive with the user.settings file, waiting for the lights to scroll green, and giving the glowing-yellow button a single tap.
3. The recovery procedure works with the light-up button. Don't do the reset procedure of holding the button and giving the 3 quick taps if you are just changing settings. For reasons I cannot explain, it will mess up the icom.
4. The Next is apparently pretty resilient, and can survive dumb stuff. Just put the 2 tar.gz firmware files on an old USB 2.0 stick with FAT32 formatting, and you can recover it.