SHIBBY's blog

Although the following design is not revolutionary at all, it still has the benefit of fulfilling its primary function and bringing back memories of electronics courses about op amps. Moreover, it does not need any specific measuring tool for the calibration process. You'll need something to generate a strong RX signal though, like your kid's PMR talkie-walkies, in order to set the full range signal reading.

De nombreuses personnes, dont certaines travaillaient à l’époque chez le constructeur, proposent déjà diverses solutions permettant de réutiliser ces postes « pro » sur les bandes radioamateur. Les logiciels embarqués qui sont utilisés donnent accès à des fonctions assez sommaires, et rendent l’utilisation de ces postes relativement inconfortable.

Ces bidouilles ont toutefois l’avantage d’exister et ont certainement permis à ces postes de ne pas finir leur vie chez le ferrailleur. Un autre avantage non négligeable est la mise à disposition des schémas qui auraient autrement eux aussi disparu, compte tenu de l’age avancé de ces postes.

On pourrait se questionner sur l’intérêt de vouloir exhumer ce vieux matériel, dont les dates de fabrication s’étendent de 1988 à 1994 d’après les plaques d’identification des postes dont je dispose. Pour le commun des mortels, la réponse est simple : aucun. D’autres fabricants proposent des postes beaucoup plus évolués, donnant accès à une bande de fréquences nettement plus large sans nécessiter de modification matérielle hasardeuse, et permettant même de s’adonner aux communications numériques, sans avoir à « réinventer la roue » pour être utilisés hors de leur domaine initial. Mon avis en tant qu’écouteur est un peu plus mitigé, notamment lorsqu’il s’agit de balayer toute une plage de fréquence, sans trou. Les postes destinés à un usage professionnel ont leurs fréquences de fonctionnement programmées en dur, majoritairement à l’aide d’un logiciel propriétaire dont l’utilisation n’est pas intuitive, ce qui limite l’utilisateur à un certain nombre de fréquences accessibles, en fonction du nombre de canaux mémorisables. La souplesse de paramétrage dont l’utilisateur dispose sur les récepteurs ou postes radioamateur est, elle aussi, soumise à l’utilisation d’un PC.

Pourquoi donc s’attaquer au logiciel embarqué d’une si vieille gamme de postes dans ce cas ?

In this episode of Aliexpress's bargains, I'll write a few words about what's sold as a Nagoya UT-108UV.
I don't delude myself, what I bought is certainly just a bad copy of a terrible clone, but whatever...
The first thing I did after opening the bubble wrap package was to unbend the nicely curved antenna, then plug it to the VNA and see how horrible it could be, and I can't say I've been deceived by what I saw...

This short article describes how I shortened my X50N in order to get a better reception on 446MHz.

This antenna was bought from Wimo's website, so I'll consider it as an genuine antenna from Diamond (not one of its numerous and probably bad clones).

This lab PSU is also sold by Velleman, under the same product name.
I own it since almost 8 years and I never had to complain about it, aside from its voltage drift that forces to regularly adjust the voltage output.
Therefore I had no reason to doubt about it when I needed a 12V power supply for powering the IP cameras I quickly installed, before going to a 2 weeks holidays off the house.
Well... what happened next proved me wrong!

This entry follows an older one I posted almost eight years ago here (link). Although I tried to make it really clear, I realize that it is not the case, even to me.

I've been contacted recently by someone who visited that other website and who was facing the same frustrating issue with his WAP54G. The device was totally bricked, as well as his two WARE54G.
Sometimes you can strap pins, sometimes you can access the shell and enter the magic commands, and sometimes (should I say most of the time) you can just hate yourself for having done something wrong. Hopefully, such mistakes can be easily fixed as long as you have the appropriate tools.

To do so, you'll need:

• a soldering iron, preferably a good one like a Weller WSD50 & TCP-S (a smaller one for SMDs would even be better) with a reasonably thin conical tip. I wouldn't recommend using a plumber soldering iron, or anything approaching;
  
• tin, lead-free or not, that's up to you;
  
• desoldering braid (or the shielding of a coaxial cable if you feel like MacGyver or Bear Grylls);
  
• anti-flux or flux cleaner (or alcohol but not the one you drink unless you live in Macedonia), if you want to wow your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors with shiny solderings;
  
• a cutter with a breakaway blade (it can be a dull one, we won't cut anything with it anyway);
  
• an universal programmer with a TSOP48 adapter (you can find really cheap adapters on ebay or aliexpress).
  

The universal programmer is certainly the missing device on your workshop but you might have access to one at the university, at work or at your local electronics shop. You can e-mail me in last resort but you should check the shipping costs to/from France first because it might be more costly than a new device.

05/01/2015:

The whole detailed procedure for desoldering & soldering the chip is now available here.
The second procedure for building a working Flash image and programming it is available here.
Please note that the first release of each document (Rev. 05/01/15) shall be considered as a draft. As stated in these documents, any comment or remark is more than welcome.

I just couldn't stay with so many questions and so few answers, so come check back the protocol descritpion in the next few weeks ;)
I've made a scan of the RC-20 Instruction manual, since it's not available anywhere else, maybe it will be useful to someone.

The LA1034 is now connected to the MIC plug. The communication protocol seems to be SPI, at least that how I'm decoding it with the "Synchronous Serial" interpreter.
The frequency can be easily identified but there are still lots of things to discover:








09/19/2012: One more evening spent playing with the RC-10. I've found how to set the TM-241E to correctly send the frequency to the RC-10, but it disables all other informations in the data frame. At least I know my RC-10 is not faulty, the TM-241E seemed to use the RC-20 protocol to send the data out, which caused the erroneous frequency on the RC-10's LCD.
Now that I have almost all data frames I think I can start to write the protocol specifications. I've also found hidden functions on the RC-10. I'll post all that stuff in a PDF ASAP.

09/21/2012: I've finally had some time to write some description of the protocol. This is still a draft though. Protocol Specifications

I've been looking for informations about Kenwood's RC-20 remote control for a long time and I've finally stumbled upon this blog recently: http://n9xlc.blogspot.fr/search/label/TM-241a
I've never been able to lay hands on one of these remote controls on eBay, mainly because they were too expensive or because the sellers didn't want to ship it to France. So thanks to this blog I've discovered that there was another device that could control my transceivers: the RC-10. I don't know if they both have the same functions, but I've found an RC-10 that I should receive next week and I'll torture it with my protocol analyzer to hack its protocol too, because I just can't wait for N9XLC to provide the whole commands list :) Besides the technical challenge, my goal is to be able to build a stand-alone board that would allow me to control my transceivers from anywhere, via an embedded web server for instance. This could lead me to build some kind of repeater controller board... who knows... what do you think about that?