On 12/30/2013 12:57 PM, Jens J. wrote:
Im not sure if you are getting at this, but one "dirty little secret" of importing images into other "identical" radios is that, in at least some models, there may be other non-exposed settings (e.g., power calibrations, deviations, level settings, etc) that are stored in the radio image,
Ok that's a bit disturbing, I wasn't aware of that. What models do that?
The clone mode radios I have played with, Yaesus and Wouxuns, appear to keep the calibration data outside of the region that is cloned or is write protected. (Cloning functionality is built into those radios, so it makes sense that the manufacturer's would figure out to protect radio specific data.)
The best approach should be to import export channels and settings directly from existing image, rather than opening the image and uploading it directly to the radio. This is up to the user to do this, but currently I doubt most users understand this, nor is it really documented anywhere (that Im aware of).
So should there be warnings on radios that aren't "clone safe"?
However this still brings back the point of how do you know what you are importing and why? How do you compare two radios? You can try to flip back and forth between open tabs, or take screen shots. For simple radios that is probably fine, but increasingly tedious on more feature-rich radios.
The "ability to import settings from existing images of same model of radio" should be the new functionality here. I think Tom mentioned this and I vote for this approach.
To prevent copying unwanted data hiding in unused fields, I'm assuming the only settings that will get imported/export are those that have defined setting interfaces. Additionally, I'm guessing you might want to have the changes go through the setting interface so any error checking will fire. So really I'm just suggesting (or hoping for) functionality that walks the known settings and can dump them in some sort of textual representation that can be examined outside of the chirp gui.
--Rob