CHIRP

Note that this breaks loading of previously saved images.

Hi Steve,

This driver was actually written by TIDRADIO themselves, so I kinda imagine they didn't implement this region of memory for a reason (but I could be wrong). We'd definitely need to fix the issue with the existing images, but we also need to make sure that this region doesn't contain radio-specific tuning values which shouldn't be shared between two radios. We have a huge problem with some other radios where this auxiliary block of memory has some settings in it that we want to get, but it also has the tuning values and people sharing images between radios are having a terrible time as a result. I definitely don't want to add another radio to that bucket.

I think the next step would be to get this proposed against the github repo where we can ask the TIDRADIO author person to have a look. That's where I interact with him, so that's probably the best route to go. If you're interested in that, you can submit to https://github.com/kk7ds/chirp .

I am familiar with other radios, like the AT-UV878, that has a large flash area that hold calibration data. So far, from analyzing the extra flash I added, theres a 100 byte or so section for adjusting the low/med/high power settings for each band range. TIDRADIO has a utility to adjust these values, it could be done in chirp easily. Then theres the Mic Gain and mayby 4 more bytes that have values that may be a setting for something.

Hopefully the TIDRADIO driver author or someone else will see this post and step up to add the missing bits. I'll keep testing in the mean time, I have two H8 units, one I leave along in case I brick the test radio. I plan on disassembling the radio to see if the flash is discrete and if I can pull the data out of it, and Im hoping there is jtag or swd type access to recover from a brick if it ever happens.

I think your warning is a good one for anyone who may like to try the modified driver.
You can already set the Mic Gain in ODMaster, and the power levels in their separate Windows app. I'm a Linux guy, so naturally I prefer to use Chirp.

As a test, I hex edited an img from my H8, changing from address 1A00-1FFF to all 0xAA and as expected, Chirp threw an error trying to render the setting in it and the radio was fairly messed up after it was uploaded.

What I found was that resetting the radio via menu or power on sequence did not restore original lo/med/hi power values stored at 0x1F58-0x1FB0, however the Mic Gain and few bytes I identified as some setting were restored. Everything else was 0xAA after the reset.

After that, I uploaded a previously saved config made with the modded driver and all the flash bytes were restored, no signs of any 0xAA bytes in the subsequently downloaded images.

It appears that the extra bytes that I have expanded the driver to handle don't currently hold data that if modified would prevent restoration. You may not TX at expected power levels, but even that is fixable via TIDRADIO software.

I will have to try harder to brick it.