[chirp_users] Tim at Yaesu Tech Support warns against Chirp, recommends RT Systems products

[Dan Smith]

> Personally, I don't see how one serial programmer could harm the 
> radio any more than another, or how a serial programmer could harm 
> the radio at all.

Yeah, definitely. Not a lot of people realize this, but we are *not*
writing firmware to the radio, but rather writing a table of things for
the radio to look at when you select a particular channel. This process
should be absolutely bulletproof, and a full reset of the device should
always undo any of the things we're writing to it. If it's not, you
don't want to own that radio anyway.

I'll note that Yaesu radios are the *worst* about verifying the incoming
image of all the major manufacturers. Most of the $30 chinese radios do
as good a job (or in some cases, better) than the $300+ Yaesu radios.
Even with that, a reset has always been able to resolve any state of
confusion I've been able to get one into.

> Fun fact, chirp is slower than the RT Systems software to program so 
> clearly it isn't like we are overheating some component by talking
> to fast or anything stupid like that.

Yeah, good point. This is an artifact of the fact that CHIRP uses a
single routine (or variation of it) to program the VX-series handhelds.
Yaesus implement no flow control on the line, and they can't accept data
at the full line speed (unlike Icoms, Kenwoods, Alincos and all the
Chinese radios I've seen). This means that we end up writing data to the
radio at the lowest common speed that all of them will accept, which is
slower than an application tuned specifically for one model would.

-- 
Dan Smith
www.danplanet.com
KK7DS

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