David Nessl wrote:
I bought a pair of new Baofeng BF-F8HP (stickers under the battery are sequential s/n 1711A00097 and 1711A0098). However, CHIRP reports that they have different firmware levels when I tried to use a single .img file to program them both. CHIRP "Help->About" reports itself as being CHIRP daily-20180210 with GTK 2.24.32, PyGTK 2.24.0, Python 2.7.14. I run CHIRP on Linux (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
CHIRP is performing exactly as it should. Unless the firmware version of the image being uploaded exactly matches the firmware version of the radio it is being uploaded to, it cannot be fully uploaded to the radio. The memory layouts vary from firmware version to firmware version and doing so can cause issues.
For s/n ...97,
CHIRP GUI reports Firmware Message 2 as '1', and the CHIRP debug log says:
[2018-03-08 11:07:43,648] chirp.drivers.uv5r - INFO: Radio Version is 'HN5RV011\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff'
For s/n ...98,
CHIRP GUI reports Firmware Message 2 as '1FB297', and the CHIRP debug log says:
[2018-03-08 11:06:09,367] chirp.drivers.uv5r - INFO: Radio Version is 'HN5RV011FB297 '
I have also attached the full debug.log.
Did I get a factory misprogrammed HT? In any case, would it be possible to treat '\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff' as "matches anything" so I could use a single .img to program both HTs?
It is unknown if it is misprogrammed or intentional. What is known is that these are not genuine BF-F8HP radios from BaofengTech (the radio dealer in the USA). Do your radios even have 3 power levels (menu 2 [TXP]) or just 2?
FYI, I'm a Linux sysadmin and programmer, so I'd be happy to try modifying CHIRP code to debug further.
There is nothing to debug. What CHIRP is doing is intentional. Your radios each report a different firmware version to CHIRP. If you want to use the same image for both, you must get 2 radios that report the same firmware version. This is not a CHIRP issue.
The HN5RV011 firmware is a good indicator of problems. It is lucky to even be supported. It took a lot of effort to be able to program radios with this firmware without causing issues to them and other radios.
You are welcome to modify the driver to support both of your radios with a single image (it wouldn't be hard to do). Just do it at your own risk (and keep an original image of each radio available).
Or you can do what I do. I use the image of one radio (my original UV-5R purchased in 2012) as my "master" image and import it into all of my other CHIRP compatible radios (Baofeng UV-82C & BF-F8HP, BTech UV-5X3, UV-25X2 & UV-25X4, Wouxun KG-UV6D V2, etc) to keep the channel assignments the same.
Jim KC9HI