CHIRP

Does it go away if you factory reset the radio? What about if you program with the factory software?

Bump?

If I program with the factory software the voice stays gone, this includes if I set it to English, Chinese, or OFF, and swapping back in any order.

As for factory resetting I do not know of a way to do that on this radio as it has no screen, I will reach out to retevis to see if they can provide me with a factory image, and if so upload it here as well.

Apologies, apparently I don't get email notifications from chirp issues so I am just seeing this post now!

Is the image provided one from the radio that was saved as a backup before making any changes? If not, would you check the CHIRP 'backup' folder (see the Help menu) to see if you can find the oldest download from your RT21V and attach it here?

That image is after everything broke, not the factory image.

I'll hunt down my backups folder later on today, different device not available to me currently. I definitely downloaded before making changes, so fingers crossed...

Email is out to retevis as well, they usually reply within 12 hours and I'd anticipate around 9PM Eastern today I'll get a file.

Sep 6, 2024 10:28:04 AM Jim Unroe redmine@chirpmyradio.com:

This seems to be a way the radios handle their programming. I am able to fix the voice prompt by:

1. Reinstalling the factory image
2. powering off the unit
3. unplugging k1 connector
4. verifying voice prompt has returned (sometimes requires second power cycle)
5. powering radio off
6. reconnect k1
7. flash desired changes e.g. CTCSS codes, Squelch level, etc.
8. steps 2-4 again

these steps have revived 8/10 of my radios, read on for the fate of the last two...

I honestly wonder if it's some weird quality control issue with how this model receives programming, I have had some quality control problems at the hardware level with the 21v, like 9/10 antennas falling apart, and two radios are now bricked where they won't accept programming from the CPS via upload or download, but retevis support has been helpful so far.

I have no way to know this for sure, but it seems the Rt17v might be a more refined unit.

Apologies for all the rambles, I want to make sure these radios are well documented so I can hopefully guide future people better.

It will be really hard to tell what's going on here unless we have a couple of images with minimal changes we can diff.

If you restore a radio, please download an image with chirp and attach here as the factory image. If you program that back to the radio with no changes, does the voice remain? Then what is the minimal change you can make with chirp to cause the voice to go away? If you can make that change from the factory image and then attach that so we can see what bits are different from the clean factory image we can try to suss out the differences.

For the most part, these radios dump their entire memory, chirp modifies that, and then loads the entire memory back into the radio. Some radios have some additional interaction (separate config blocks and such) but not most. I'm not familiar with this specific model (@Jim Unroe is) but if it's a detectable difference between two images then I can work on what in chirp is causing that.