Dumb noob idea: Officially working with Radiodity?

Post Reply
AK3Q
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Oct 29, 2021 4:56 am

Dumb noob idea: Officially working with Radiodity?

Post by AK3Q » Fri Oct 29, 2021 3:04 pm

This is my first day on this forum, so posts I make today are totally uninformed.... In my experience in a new place like this, the answers are usually "Yeah, we've been doing that for years now", or "We tried that and got shot down because of XYZ." That said, my noob questions:

Have community members tried reaching out to Radiodity to see if we can work with them in an open, positive, blessed manner? I see we're taking great pains to scrub source code from our code base that does not have a clean copyright history, and I'm willing to help in that effort. However, sooner or later, the GD-77 will become a dinosaur as new radios are released. How awesome would it be to work collaboratively with the manufacturer so that shortly after public launch, OpenGD77 were up and running perfectly on the new radios? Sure, we probably achieve that today, but how cool would it be to be part of their press releases, and to have simpler installation, etc?

Frankly, I would never have bought two of these things if it were not for OpenGD77. Hackability matters to the ham community. Radiodity currently seems to have the lead in hackability. Would they be willing to work with this community to further that lead?

73, Bill ak3q

VK3KYY
Posts: 7490
Joined: Sat Nov 16, 2019 3:25 am
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: Dumb noob idea: Officially working with Radiodity?

Post by VK3KYY » Sat Oct 30, 2021 5:42 am

Radioddity / TYT / Baofeng are well aware of the firmware.

FYI.
Radioddity are just a vertical marketing company, they buy and rebrand radios from other manufacturers e.g. TYT
TYT make the MD-760 radio hardware. Radioddiy sell it outside China as the GD77.
Retevis are also a rebranding company, who buy TYT hardware.

TYT don't write the firmware, its written by an secertive third party company, who TYT / Radioddity won't divulge, probably for legal reasons. The same firmware development company writes the firmware for Baofeng, and for many other radio hardware manufacturers.
It's possible / likely that the firmware development "company" is part of the Chinese governmental sector.

Neither TYT or Baofeng etc have the source code to the firmware.
The manufacturers don't even have access to the datasheets for special Chinese made chips in these radios e.g. HR-C6000 and AT1846S.

So they are unable to provide any support.

Post Reply