Radio Geekery

I have a pair of Yaesu VX-6 hand held amateur radios, and I really wanted to be able to program them without needing a microsoft windows box. So, I found this great bit of python code and specs for the programming file that LA4RT Jon Kåre Hellan posted at http://jk.ufisa.uninett.no/la4rt/vx-6-protocol.html.

I’ve been mucking with it a bit and have a working copy on Mac OS X that does the download, but still can’t figure out the checksums…

One of the key things that I have figured out is the sequence of acknowledgments to and from the radio at key points in the transfer and added a percentage complete counter for the main data transaction. There is one ACK sent after you receive the header (10 bytes) which tells the radio to send the data, it then send you an ACK, then there is a second ACK required after the main data transfer (32575 bytes ending in C9 FF) which causes the radio to send an ACK and the final checksum. The nice thing about the 32575 byte transfer is it is divisible by 25 and makes for an easy progress counter.

Once I figure out how to do it in Blogger, I'll link the two python files that I am working with, and a copy of the vx6 binary configuration here for reference: checksum.py, vx-6.py, and vx6.out.