Starting D-Star with an ID-800H I was trying to reduce the work load of manual entering all memory information directly into the radio and installed CHIRP. I have to admit that I run into nearly every possible trap the program offers for a new user. But with the help of Dan I was able to get it up and running at the end. Might be a beginner’s guide or a help file within the program could help to reduce the efforts in climbing up the learning curve … (based on my experience I could offer some limited help). There are some issues, however, I consider as worthwhile to discuss in this group:

1.      Excel uses the local settings of the OS. Therefore xxx.csv – files created by the export of an xxx.img-files to a xxx.csv cannot be re-opened again by CHIRP once they have been processed and eventually modified in Excel and saved there again as xxx.csv or yyy.csv  Reason is that the local settings in the OS (here  German instead of English (USA)) create semicolons (;) instead of commas (,) as separator, don’t use a dot (.) but a comma (,) for the decimal information etc. . I have tried to modify the file by an editor using search and replace but the editor doesn’t save the result in a way CHIRP would finally process. It would be nice if the program could work in a non-English environment as well.

2.      After a successful export and import of xxx.csv under English local settings I have tried to do the same with xxx.chirp. This failed, however, with the error notice “Unable to load schema”. At the moment I don’t know why this happens.

3.      I have imported the xxx.csv into Excel (with English settings), saved it as xxx_1.csv and tried to import or open the saved file in CHIRP. Both failed with the error notice list index out of range. I assume there is something I have to set in Excel but unfortunately I don’t know what to do here. Might be it’s somehow related to my Excel version but not sure.

73

Juergen, DL8LE