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Restore factory firmware, did I goof up?

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2021 4:34 pm
by KE0DHC
I picked up my first DMR radio, a DM-1801 and discovered pretty quickly that scan was broken. I suspect now it was because of loading 2.1.9 codeplug on 2.2.5 firmware, but that's a problem for another day. I found forums saying 2.2.5 was buggy, jumped to a conclusion, and went in search of OpenGD77. Found a video, installed it, and decided I didn't like the loss of being able to program my own keys and decided to restore. Without RTFM. Needless to say I ended up with a "low bt version" and was pretty sure I'd bricked the radio. Nothing would talk to it anymore and after 5 panicked hours I hit the rack. Well, this morning I rebooted my computer and low and behold I was able to push OpenGD77 back to it, and it's booting fine. I'd like to be able to say I followed the instructions that said "Backup flash, eprom etc immediately after installing OpenGD77" but I cant.

As soon as I was able to reinstall OpenGD77, I backed up the flash, eprom, mcurom and calibration, but I have no idea if the files are any good given they were not taken "Immediately after installing" the first time. And quite frankly I'm a bit gun-shy now about doing a restore wrong and permanently bricking this thing. I'm a network engineer/server admin in the real world, rolling patches back and forth and same with server firmware is secondhand, but I've never bricked a server doing it. This was a real eye-opener. It's only a $59 radio, but that's a lot of cups of coffee if I need to buy a new one.

I've seen a few threads where people have successfully rolled back to factory firmware but I haven't been able to decipher the actual order of things. What I do know so far is:
1) I need to use the Baofeng firmware updater to restore 2.2.5
2) The flash and eprom need to be restored either before, after, or at the same time as the 2.2.5 firmware
3) At some point the radio needs to be in flash mode
4) At some point the radio needs to be power cycled.
5) With the radio in flash mode, I don't seem to have a com port pointing to it.

Can anyone who's managed to do this give me some direction of how all this research fits together?

Thank you in advance,

Steve

Re: Restore factory firmware, did I goof up?

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2021 7:56 pm
by oh1fss
Hi Steve!

Have you read this: LOW BT VERSION

When the radio is in firmware update mode, it does not appear as a COM device, it's a HID. During other OpenGD77 operations (such as codeplug read/write) the radio is a COM device.

73, OH1FSS

Re: Restore factory firmware, did I goof up?

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2021 10:11 pm
by VK3KYY
KE0DHC wrote:
Wed Feb 10, 2021 4:34 pm
Can anyone who's managed to do this give me some direction of how all this research fits together?
Its unclear the current state of your radio.

Is it running again with the official firmware, but No Com port?
oh1fss is correct. Only the OpenGD77 makes the radio appear as a Com port.

The OpenGD77 firmware does this so that the radio can be connected to PiStar etc as a hotspot.

So if you are not getting any error screens e.g. LOW BT, then you have restored the official firmware.

You will need to use the Official Baofeng DM1801 CPS to upload and download codeplugs etc

You will probably need to replace the codeplug that is in the radio, because the OpenGD77 firmware has 80 channels per zone but the official Baofeng codeplug format only supports 16 channels.
The symptoms of a missmatch in codeplug format, will be that only the first zone will work, and if your Zone basic settings don't specify the first Zone as the initial / startup zone, the radio will most likely show CH EMPTY as it can't read the channel from the extended zone data in the codeplug in the radio.



One other thing..
I didn't like the loss of being able to program my own keys and decided to restore
I'm not entire sure what you mean.

The OpenGD77 has a QuickKeys system to access menu's and individual functions, but it does not have a system to select individual contacts by pressing a single key

Re: Restore factory firmware, did I goof up?

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2021 5:55 am
by F1RMB
Hi,

You can assign a contact to a quickkey ;-)



Cheers.
---
Daniel