Firmware on John Flinchbaugh KD3EE

Nicsure 5.14.01

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I loaded the nicsure 5.14.01 firmware from the patreon onto my RadTel RT-880G. It changed storage stucture, so I needed to do a factory reset before installing. I found the RMS software does weird things importing chirp files or reading from the radio. I needed to sort out erroneous CTS codes, reverses, etc in the RMS.

The radio is receiving APRS really well off the outside antenna, and I’m seeing lots of good decodes.

Radtel RT-880g Firmware 1.16

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Radtel RT-880G got new firmware yesterday: 1.16. I had to run the upgrade software in WINE.

APRS occasionally receives a message that PASSES the FCS check, but still mostly failed, and some are completely garbled chinese characters.
TX APRS looks pretty good now. I’ve seen on BTech UV-PRO and on https://aprs.fi/.
Listening to “Radio” mode is cool: 20M CW, FT8, and a little voice.
The menus are pretty confusing, and it’s hard to remember the controls, especially in “Radio”.
I was using the radio in “Full Band Tuning”, but it causes problems in spectrum mode, so I went back to normal mode.

R1CBU 0.30.0 Firmware Update

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Changes

R1CBU 0.30.0 brings several notable changes:

The ATT/PRE indicator has been split again, allowing them to operate independently.
A fix for storing/loading of the ATU network has been implemented. This is a different implementation from the PR I submitted.
Controls for an alternate patched baseband have been added, though I haven’t tried the new baseband yet.

Testing

The software continues to reload preferences from the previous version, which is good. The UI changes look promising. However, the Maximum Usable Frequency (MUF) has been low for the past couple of weeks, making 20M barely usable today. Despite that challenge, I can still see my reports on PSKReporter on 20M. I’ve been keeping my power at around 2W for the past couple of months. My first contact with this new firmware was hunting a park near Memphis, TN, on FT8, using 2W.

X6100 R1CBU 0.29.2 ATU Bug

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I encountered a bug with the ATU in the X6100 running R1CBU firmware version 0.29.2.

The ATU networking information is stored in both a cache and the params.db file. When setting multiple tunings close to each other (e.g., 7073, 7074, 7075 kHz), the radio would rapidly cycle through them as the VFO was spun. This behavior cluttered the configurations and made it difficult for the ATU network to hold a stable tune near a signal.

Upon investigation, I discovered that while the cache retained all these closely spaced tunings, the params.db only saved one of them. The intention behind the new feature in R1CBU was to remove the hard boundaries between ATU configurations (which were previously every 25 or 50 kHz), allowing a single tuning network to be effective within approximately 25 kHz in either direction. The database would correctly update a nearby frequency to the middle, but the cache’s retention of every tuning caused the “thrashing” effect. Switching antennas or cycling power would reload the sparser collection of networks from the database, temporarily resolving the issue.

I filed a bug report, and submitted a pull request to fix it.

I patched the ATU code to reload the cache from the database immediately, effectively discarding the extraneous nearby networks.

UV-PRO Firmware 0.8.0

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The HT app presented the firmware update right away upon launching, so now I know it can do the upgrade. The first time I updated the radio, I used the older “BTech Programmer” app.

The update promises some fixes around

ack in in-built APRS,
TNC stability

I discovered in the app the setting: Radio -> ID Settings -> 3 Checkboxes (ID, Location, Check) could be turned off to get to “none” to disable post-TX noises, which is “PTT Release” in the radio.

Those settings kept getting synced from the app to the radio, so now they’re set the way I want it to stay. I could have also disabled “Synchronous Signal Settings” in the app, but the mismatch seems like it would have been confusing.

X6100 Firmware Again

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Xiegu released another updated firmware for the X6100: APP 1.1.9 & BASE 1.1.8, dated 2024-09-23.

I downloaded it from Radioddity, and wrote it to an SD card:

$ sudo dd if=sdcard.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress

I booted the new card for the app upgrade to 1.1.9,
I applied baseband 1.1.8 from the menu in the UI.
I tried the CW key in the stock firmware, and it transmitted (unlike last time).
I booted back to R1CBU, and it looked good there as well.

I did a little FT8, decoded some CW, and listened to some SSB on 40m. I found I could to turn the RF Gain closer to 100 instead of below 63. It may be reading slightly lower power on the display before ALC kicks in: up to but not over the 5W, where it used to often push a little past.

It’ll stay.

Failed Upgrade for X6100

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Radioddity had the new firmware for the X6100. I downloaded it, wrote it, installed it, and rebooted it to see the stock APP 1.1.8 and BASE 1.1.7. That mostly-useless audio spectrum is gone. The strange jump at 63 in RF GAIN is fixed.

BUT transmitting gave NO POWER. R1CBU also exhibited the problem. When I downgraded to BASE 1.1.6, it transmitted again. Others had seen this problem as well, while others had it work. It must have depended upon variations in the hardware.

F4HWN 3.3

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I loaded F4HWN 3.3 onto my UV-K5 to have a look. It only has 3 scan lists, and it’s awkward to cycle through them. I found starting the spectrum analyzer to be cumbersome as well, since i couldn’t attach it to a long-press of a button. The single VFO view is pretty nice; it puts lots of nice info on the screen, and it’s big. Ultimately, I went right back to AubsUK for the scan features.

Bug Scanning on Aubs 00.07

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have my UV-K5 and UV-K6 running aubs 00.07 firmware. I added a simplex frequency (446.100MHz) to use as with my local cross-band repeater in position 110. I added the new channel to scan list 1.

Upon powering on the radio, I could scan lists 1 (local repeaters) and 4 (satellites) together. When I press the up arrow to advance off an active channel, the scan would now skip list 1, and go right to 4, and continue to skip list 1. Before I realized it was happening, I thought the day was super quiet.

I dropping the repeater frequency from scan list 1, and the scanning behaved correctly. I tried removing another channel from scan list 1, and reintroducing channel 110 to the list, but that didn’t fix it, so it’s not an issue with the count.

Much of scan list 1 is lower in the channels, so I moved my new repeater frequency from channel 110 to position 30, right after all my other simplex channels. That seems to work fine, so that’s how I’m leaving it.

I may need to try some more things and figure out a reproduction to file a bug on the project:

Is it something about the frequency of 460.100?
Or is channel 110 the problem?
Would another frequency in that spot be a problem?
Are there other channels that would trigger the issue?

New Firmware for X6100

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 23:44:38 -0400

There’s a new person building onto Oleg’s R1CBU firmware. He first made a patch TGZ available, and then an entire image.

He has a repo for this work, and it includes some build instructions which reference the buildroot and submodules. I think I’m close to being able to build it, but I’m seeing some errors trying to find the xkbcommon headers.

I did patch his source with my DB changes. I built the DB: sqlite3 params.db < params.sql, mounted the DATA partition, and copied my custom params.db to it.

It’s looking nice so far. I can use flrig and have wsjtx and fldigi both talk to it simultaneously. That’s the main improvement in my mind, but it includes some other fixes:

volume encoder can be spun quickly now
smoothing of the TX/SWR graphs
finer detail in the waterfall

Aubs Firmware

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m trying out the Aubs 00.07 firmware on my Quansheng radios. It’s based on the latest egzumer, and so far has kept up-to-date, and it has its own plugin for Chirp.

It has some really cool features for scanning:

scan on start, a feature I requested of egzumer, but was denied by egzumer.
10 scan lists. I organized mine as:
- 1 = local repeaters and popular simplex
- 2 = all simplex, Ham and GMRS
- 3 = non-local repeaters and other listening
- 4 = satellites
press * to lockout a frequency from scan.
fast scan like egzumer
frequency spectrum analyzer, but no memory spectrum analyzer like nunu.

This is my daily driver now on both my radios.

Quansheng Firmware Updates

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I flashed minor updates to the UV-K5 using Chromium and https://whosmatt.github.io/uvmod/. This got me the following features:

RSSI meter
Mic boost
Better menu strings
18mhz-1300mhz for receive
Backlight on for longer