Firmware

Xiegu released another updated firmware for the X6100: APP 1.1.9 & BASE 1.1.8, dated 2024-09-23.

1. I downloaded it from Radioddity, and wrote it to an SD card:

$ sudo dd if=sdcard.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress

2. I booted the new card for the app upgrade to 1.1.9,
3. I applied baseband 1.1.8 from the menu in the UI.
4. I tried the CW key in the stock firmware, and it transmitted (unlike last time).
5. I booted back to R1CBU, and it looked good there as well.

I did a little FT8, decoded some CW, and listened to some SSB on 40m. I found I could to turn the RF Gain closer to 100 instead of below 63. It may be reading slightly lower power on the display before ALC kicks in: up to but not over the 5W, where it used to often push a little past.

It’ll stay.

Radioddity had the new firmware for the X6100. I downloaded it, wrote it, installed it, and rebooted it to see the stock APP 1.1.8 and BASE 1.1.7. That mostly-useless audio spectrum is gone. The strange jump at 63 in RF GAIN is fixed.

BUT transmitting gave NO POWER. R1CBU also exhibited the problem. When I downgraded to BASE 1.1.6, it transmitted again. Others had seen this problem as well, while others had it work. It must have depended upon variations in the hardware.

I loaded F4HWN 3.3 onto my UV-K5 to have a look. It only has 3 scan lists, and it’s awkward to cycle through them. I found starting the spectrum analyzer to be cumbersome as well, since i couldn’t attach it to a long-press of a button. The single VFO view is pretty nice; it puts lots of nice info on the screen, and it’s big. Ultimately, I went right back to AubsUK for the scan features.

I have my UV-K5 and UV-K6 running aubs 00.07 firmware. I added a simplex frequency (446.100MHz) to use as with my local cross-band repeater in position 110. I added the new channel to scan list 1.

Upon powering on the radio, I could scan lists 1 (local repeaters) and 4 (satellites) together. When I press the up arrow to advance off an active channel, the scan would now skip list 1, and go right to 4, and continue to skip list 1. Before I realized it was happening, I thought the day was super quiet.

I dropping the repeater frequency from scan list 1, and the scanning behaved correctly. I tried removing another channel from scan list 1, and reintroducing channel 110 to the list, but that didn’t fix it, so it’s not an issue with the count.

Much of scan list 1 is lower in the channels, so I moved my new repeater frequency from channel 110 to position 30, right after all my other simplex channels. That seems to work fine, so that’s how I’m leaving it.

I may need to try some more things and figure out a reproduction to file a bug on the project:

• Is it something about the frequency of 460.100?
• Or is channel 110 the problem?
• Would another frequency in that spot be a problem?
• Are there other channels that would trigger the issue?

There’s a new person building onto Oleg’s R1CBU firmware. He first made a patch TGZ available, and then an entire image.

He has a repo for this work, and it includes some build instructions which reference the buildroot and submodules. I think I’m close to being able to build it, but I’m seeing some errors trying to find the xkbcommon headers.

I did patch his source with my DB changes. I built the DB: sqlite3 params.db < params.sql, mounted the DATA partition, and copied my custom params.db to it.

It’s looking nice so far. I can use flrig and have wsjtx and fldigi both talk to it simultaneously. That’s the main improvement in my mind, but it includes some other fixes:

• volume encoder can be spun quickly now
• smoothing of the TX/SWR graphs
• finer detail in the waterfall

I’m trying out the Aubs 00.07 firmware on my Quansheng radios. It’s based on the latest egzumer, and so far has kept up-to-date, and it has its own plugin for Chirp.

It has some really cool features for scanning:

• scan on start, a feature I requested of egzumer, but was denied by egzumer.
• 10 scan lists. I organized mine as:
  • 1 = local repeaters and popular simplex
  • 2 = all simplex, Ham and GMRS
  • 3 = non-local repeaters and other listening
  • 4 = satellites
• press * to lockout a frequency from scan.
• fast scan like egzumer
• frequency spectrum analyzer, but no memory spectrum analyzer like nunu.

This is my daily driver now on both my radios.

I flashed minor updates to the UV-K5 using Chromium and https://whosmatt.github.io/uvmod/. This got me the following features:

• RSSI meter
• Mic boost
• Better menu strings
• 18mhz-1300mhz for receive
• Backlight on for longer