I think not. The radio state gets saved in flash every power off, at least. Kind of dwarfs a few hundred clone writes. And the radio was fairly new as these things go. And modern flash is usually good for 10K - 100K writes. But it's plausible for the first radio's failure. Part of a spectrum of stuff related to what I said might be abuse, which also includes a lot of serial cable in & out, knob twiddling, ...

But the new one died the day it was purchased, after two OK clone writes. On the third, with the same image that killed the first one, it died with the same symptoms. I'm not buying flash write wearout.

The bits did it.

-dan

On Mar 22, 2014, at 6:02 PM, jon - jon@jonshouse.co.uk wrote:

I would try de-soldering the 24C256 and soldering a new one in. Most probable cause of its death is passing the maximum write cycles for the eeprom. With luck the yaesu firmware is bright enough to initialise a blank one ..... with luck !

Jon