Rt880g

I’ve paid for the Nicsure Patreon to get access to his new firmware for the Radtel RT-880G, and I’ve used his Linux CPS to flash it and load channels.

Having a Linux CPS alone is an amazing enhancement. The UI is not necessarily intuitive compared to other radios, but I’m getting accustomed to it. Most the functions I want from the menu are found by long-pressing the green button, and it shows you the shortcut key you could use. There are also posts about an extended manual that helps a bit, but I still found mismatches.

I have it beaconing APRS and receiving, but it still struggles to get a good decode. The stock firmware shows garbage decodes, but his one just doesn’t show anything for those failures.

It seems to have nice scanning, HF receive, and the spectrum analyzer.

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.

I got WINE setup to run the software for RadTel. I had to install Mono for Windows inside WINE to make the RadTel CPS and Flasher work: https://askubuntu.com/a/992215 I also got serial going: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Wine-User%27s-Guide#serial-and-parallel-ports

The APRS support on the RadTel RT-880G still seems a bit broken, though. I keep seeing a stray character in the path: “WIDE1_-1” Setting the path in CPS software had the same problem. Setting the path to " WIDE1" makes it show OK in packets.