Glad to hear you've added some preliminary support for this. I'm just curious what did this radio look like from a protocol perspective?
Are there any similarities emerging for these chinese radios?
Yes. Before I got the programming cable from the person I borrowed it from, I put it on the service monitor to check it out. I knew right then that it wasn't the Yaesu guts and that they only attempted to mimic the external appearance. I have a little more on that, if you're interested.
The programming mechanism and memory format are very similar to the Wouxun, Puxing, and the other radios that appear to have come from a stolen commercial Kenwood radio. You can see from the patch that I just added it as a variant of the Wouxun, using the same core upload/download routines.
The memory format is strange and I honestly can say I don't really understand it. The strangeness may be indicative of a firmware author that didn't really know what he was doing, but rather was just tasked with porting some of the stolen firmware to their radio. It seems to store the memory channels twice in memory, once at the beginning and once at the end. It stores the TX frequency separate from the RX frequency (like the Wouxun) but also stores the offset (unlike the Wouxun) and uses that instead of the TX frequency when you hit PTT.
Storage of the tone and DCS code information is simpler and more straightforward than the Puxing and Wouxun (which are both nearly identical but just different enough to be annoying).
How's that?