?
Apologies in advance, Clint, for using your well-intentioned response as a starting point for this note. Your statement "CHIRP has been known to ¡°brick¡± several models of Yaesu radios - a well-documented phenomenon¡± doesn¡¯t ring true to me, and doesn¡¯t reflect my own experience.
In fairness, here¡¯s another quote from Dan Smith, developer of CHIRP, source here:?
No, CHIRP will not intentionally let you brick radios and we know of no circumstances where it has done it. There are plenty of urban legends out there about people that think something has happened and been caused by any number of factors. I'm not aware of anyone having approached the chirp team with a bricked radio and a demonstrable process by which it happened.
Yaesu radios are very fragile (they don't fully reset their own memories when you do a factory reset, for example), so there's always a possibility that you could do something that would confuse the radio and not be able to reset it. Even though I've severely confused them while developing for them, I've never had one I couldn't recover. Other brands are far more robust in this regard and are pretty much bulletproof.
There have been issues, beyond CHIRP, with buggy, factory-installed FT-60 firmware but they¡¯re old news, circa 2014.
Using untried cables with any radio you depend on is probably a bad idea. Having acquired a set of reliable interface cables for whatever families of radios you own and program, the advantage to using CHIRP is having one software application and interface for programming across a range of manufacturers' radios.?
In addition, while I understand the economic appeal to RT Systems of a ¡°one radio, one application¡± business strategy, the net effect to me, as an amateur operator on a budget, is charging me a $25 tax for software for each model of radio I wish to program.?
If you only have one radio to program, with little expectation of expanding your collection, the choice between RT Systems and CHIRP isn¡¯t consequential. As your radio stable becomes larger, it becomes less and less tenable to ignore CHIRP.
If you¡¯re squeamish about cable quality, spend $30 for an RT Systems cable for each radio type you own. (And NB, one cable might serve for multiple radio models from a single manufacturer.)
If you¡¯re finding CHIRP to be frustrating to install or use, find a local elmer to walk you through the process or program the radio for you the first time, and save off a code plug and CSV files for you. (And sorry I don¡¯t have a my starting notes for using CHIRP with an FT-60 in front of me to be able to share them. It *was* frustrating the first time or two I used it, and isn¡¯t as well documented as I might like it to be, but it¡¯s a very useful app, with good support.)
$0.02
Rick
KK6WHJ
***
CHIRP has been known to ¡°brick¡± several models of Yaesu radios - a well-documented phenomenon.
I, too, have experimented with CHIRP - on a spare FT-60R.
?But from the CHIRP web site ...
¡°We receive no help from the vendors or manufacturers of the radios, and as such our drivers are developed by reverse-engineering. There is some risk involved in that, but everything carries some amount of risk (like buying the cheapest possible programming cable from questionable eBay vendors to program your expensive radio with). As with anything that is widely deployed and used by regular people, over time urban legends have developed about CHIRP, how it works, and how it is or is not dangerous to use. The internet gives anyone a soap box to stand on, and it places everyone on an equal footing, regardless of their actual level of understanding of the thing they're talking about. CHIRP comes with no warranty (or cost!) and you are always using it at your own risk ... ¡°
Personally and professionally, I recommend RTSystems¡¯ software and cables ...
--
Clint Bradford K6LCS
http//
_._,_._,
