Hi Andy,

> 1. Should I have beta testers of my driver test from my fork prior to submitting a PR, or is there a better/preferred approach to this?

I've done it both ways. It depends on if I know anyone that has the
radio and is willing to provide reasonably good testing. It his case I
have a TYT TH-8600 still in its factory state that I can use for
testing.

> 3. I'm having some issues with tests and am not confident that my driver is actually being tested.  This is my first experience with tox, so I'm fumbling a bit.

I am assuming that you have added a properly named CHIRP Radio Images
(*.img) file from the TH-8600 to the /tests/images folder?

It sounds like you may not have included match_model() in your driver
so CHIRP is defaulting to an "old-school" detection method which is
matching the H777. You need to have something like the following in
your driver to tell CHIRP that it should only use the metadata blob
attached to the end of the image to identify the correct model.

    @classmethod
    def match_model(cls, filedata, filename):
        # This radio has always been post-metadata, so never do
        # old-school detection
        return False

Jim KC9HI