[chirp_users] Latest CHIRP shows wrong radio on old .img file

[Jim Unroe]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 7:27 PM Tom ND5Y via chirp_users
<chirp_users at intrepid.danplanet.com> wrote:
>
> Today I was looking at an old factory default CHIRP .img image file from a UV-82 (dual band, two power levels, B82S25 firmware) that I downloaded from the radio on 10 Dec 2013 when it was new and probably with the latest version of CHIRP at that time.
>
> When I opened the file with the latest version of CHIRP (CHIRP daily-20191022) it shows the radio model as a Radioddity UV-82X3. That should be impossible.
>
> I haven't looked at the file for several years so I don't know when CHIRP started  doing this. I can send the file to one of the devs if they want it.
>
> Tom ND5Y

Hi Tom,

The problem is Baofeng is making tri-band radios by taking dual-band
radios and adding the third band. Other than changing the model number
they have been doing nothing internally that allows CHIRP identify the
difference between the dual-band and tri-band radios. In the past they
would change the "magic" string used to initiate cloning and use a
different firmware version sequence that would use by CHIRP to detect
which radio model was which. Now it is becoming rare to find anything
different in the radio's image for CHIRP to use to identify the model.
Just a guess, but I think when you load your image back into CHIRP,
the first memory match is what CHIRP uses.

Something that happened about a year ago is that CHIRP now adds a
"metadata blob trailer" (blob) onto the end of every image that
contains the radio model that was selected when the image was
downloaded from the radio. This should greatly help to eliminate this
issue in the future.

If you run Windows, one thing you can do (and I just tried it to make
sure it works) would be to download a win32.zip archive of CHIRP that
was available before the UV-82X3 support was added to CHIRP but after
the "blob" was added. I used chirp-daily-20190102-win32.zip (the first
release of 2019) because it was convenient. Any build from this year
and prior to July 17 should work.

Just extract the file anywhere convenient and run it by
double-clicking the chirpw.exe file. Load your image and it should be
detected as coming from a UV-82. Save it back out to a CHIRP Radio
Images (*.img) file and it will get the "blob" added to it. Now even
with the latest CHIRP build, your image will be detected as coming
from a UV-82.

You can use this link to get access to all the builds released in
2019: https://trac.chirp.danplanet.com/chirp_daily/

You can do the same thing if you are running Linux. You will just be
working with the tar.gx tarball archive.

Jim KC9HI