On Fri, Nov 1, 2024 at 11:25 PM Dan Smith via Developers < developers@lists.chirpmyradio.com> wrote:
I have a new TD-H3 that allows me to enable 1.25m TX.
What does that mean? Is there a setting in the radio? That would surprise me, but...
Yes, the radio now has among its settings: 52.200TX (default OFF) 53.350TX (default OFF) 54.500TX (default off)
I haven't yet done a complete comparison to see all the settings that are new relative to what's in chirp.
42.Version is set to HAM_240416 but of course that's not a setting that I can change.
I tried to chirp it to set up some local 1.25m repeaters, but could not
because of the _txbands limitation. (It also allows setting TX on some bands that aren't ham bands in the US.) I would like to chirp those 1.25m repeaters into the unit, which would require me to update chirp.
Why not just put the radio into unrestricted mode where there are basically no limits?
Because I'd rather not accidentally transmit on bands that I'm not permitted to. I'm a chicken, but also human and make mistakes, and at least as a brand new ham I appreciate the training wheels...
If not then probably not, yeah. _Is_ this new behavior from a new firmware version? If so, do you have a link to a changelog or something that explains it?
Heh. If anyone knows where tidradio would keep such things, I'm all ears/eyes. I haven't seen that the firmware is upgradeable either. I understand that earlier versions had excessive spurious emissions on 1.25, that tidradio said they were addressing that, and as I understand it they have enabled this setting in firmware for hardware for which they fixed that problem. This is all third-hand.
Do we get the firmware version during the clone exchange perhaps? If so, we can memorize it at that point for later.
I've been looking and so far I don't see it.
I can't change it to reverse it to be sure, but it's not obviously present as a string, or as three nearly adjacent bytes with values 0x4, 0x10, and 0x18 in the dump anywhere.
I saved a factory settings image first thing after powering it on, and I'm happy to provide that to you if you like. If I succeed at this, I presume I'd include it in my PR.
Your sample image in the repository starts: 00000000 50 33 31 31 38 33 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff |P31183..........|
My factory image, as well as every other dump I've checked that I've done, starts: 00000000 50 33 31 31 38 35 ff ff 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |P31185..........|
If we could get more dumps with different firmware versions and settings, we might be able to map P3118? to different feature sets.
- There's only one MEM_FORMAT for the radios supported in tdh8.py and I
have no idea whether the formats have diverged between radios because I have only a TD-H3 to play with.
There are two, one for the H3 and one for the H8. No structural changes due to firmware versions have happened that I know of.
Yeah, I realized my eyes had glazed over and missed the separate settings after I sent that message. Oops.
I have one of each that I can test with, but I'm not super familiar with them. It's very important that we not break older firmware versions if this really is new, as you indicate, so thanks for already thinking in that mode.
I have plenty of kernel driver experience with variant firmware, so I'm quite sensitive to this potential. ☺
I'll hope I don't have to declare a whole new radio for this. But first I should get this working on my radio, and then if that succeeds we can talk about what a PR should look like to be acceptable.