I'm Very Impressed

[KE8VOD]

I'm a relatively new ham (KE8VOD). I retired in September of 2016. I have a strong background in computers/networking and technology in general. Recently a neighbor (who's a ham) couldn't get DMR working on his MD-9600. He was told by the ham club "DMR guru" that DMR on the radio was broken. The radio is brand new but he bought it 2 years ago so it was out of warranty. He was going to trash the radio so I asked him if I could take a look at it. He said, "Knock yourself out. It's junk anyways."

I figured it was a firmware problem so I tried various combinations of TYT firmware and CPS versions with no luck. Then I discovered opengd77. As a last resort I installed the opengd77 firmware and, as you've all discovered yourselves, it worked wonderfully.

A month later I ran across another MD-9600 on a used equipment site that was "broken". I bought it for $119 and immediately installed opengd77 and you all know the rest of the story.

Opengd77 is VERY impressive! I now wish it was available for many more radios.

Chris

[VK3KYY]

If these are quite old radios, then the DMR problem is a hardware one, where the PA does not turn on fast enought to cleanly transmit each DMR pulse / frame, unless the power is set to "High" when using the official firmware

Anicdotally, the OpenGD77 firmware seems to be slightly better, possibly because the firmware turns on the PA slighly earlier than the official firmware

I did some initial work with G4TSN who had a problematic MD-9600, trying to get around the PA problem, by dynamically varying the PA drive duing the DMR pulse, but it didnt seem to make any difference, however G4TSN suddently found that the radio seemed to be working OK, even without my experimental changes to the PA drive.


Regarding getting the firmware onto more radios.

Unfortunately, it literally takes years to write the firmware for each radio, and newer radios contain chips for which there is no documentation, which makes it virtually impossible

Its not just these Chinese radios that are undocumented, its also radios from the main stream brands like Yaesu / Kenwood and Icom.
The OpenRTX firmware team had been attempting to get their firmware working on a Yaesu handheld, but seem to have run into a brick wall with that.

[KE8VOD]

Thanks for the reply:
The first MD-9600 was a version 5 according to the main circuit board. The current 9600 is a version 4. So far both are working great on the OpenGD77 firmware.

One question though. I'd like to shut off the promiscuous mode but I'm having trouble with it. In searching this forum I found a reply you had sent to someone saying that if I only want to hear the current Talk Group, I'd need to set the DMR Filter to "RxG". I've done that but if I exit the quickmenu then immediately go back to the Quick Menu - DMR Filter again it always shows "None". What am I doing wrong? -Feel free to make this a new thread if needed.

Thanks,
Chris
KE8VOD

[VK3KYY]

The firmware is designed for promiscious operation by default. Its not possible to permanently configure it to be restricted.
So if you reboot the radio, that setting will be lost

In your instance, you seem to imply that immediatly re-entering the Quick Menu shows the filter is off, indicating it has never been turned on.

So somehow you are not pressing the correct keys to turn it on.