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Icom F6121 Password protected problem

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nevets10

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I am trying to reprogram an Icom F6121 radio but it is password protected within the radio software and no one at the station knows the password. Does anyone know a way around the password, or how to read it?
Thanks in advance!
 

ElroyJetson

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DO NOT ASK ME FOR HELP PROGRAMMING YOUR RADIO. NO.
It's password protected to keep you from changing the programming. Since you wrote "No one at the station knows..." then I assume you mean fire station.

The radio shop that services and maintains those radios will have the password. You could ask them.
You're not going to get past the password issue by brute force. Even updating the firmware won't do it There is no backdoor password.

You'd have to erase the EEPROM entirely to clear it if you don't know the password.

If the radio is department property, I would strongly advise against even attempting to alter its programming without authorization from someone who has the authority to allow you to do it. Tampering with department radios is almost always severely frowned upon.

But then again, maybe this radio is your property and you bought it and didn't know it was password protected. You'd have to send it to Icom's service department to get them to clear the password, unless you want to spend the rest of your life trying every possible password.

Try the last 4 digits of the radios's serial number. That is a fairly common password system used by a good number of radio shops.

Try the 4 numerals in the radio's model number.

You could contact Icom and ask, based on the serial number, what radio shop the radio was initially sold to. Contact that shop and maybe, just maybe, they have records of the password and will give them to you.
 

biglogdog

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Good luck... It's nearly impossible to bypass the password on those radios. Icom did a good job locking down those radios. When you read the radio, you are prompted for a password. The radio then verifies what you input vs what's in the radio and shuts down if it doesn't match. There's been several posts regarding the topic, but nobody seems to be able to do it. Someone over at communications.support claims to have used WinHex to get the password out of an Icom 4163, but I haven't heard of anyone else having luck with it. I've used everything from WinHex to Wireshark to try to find the password but I just gave up.
 

ElroyJetson

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DO NOT ASK ME FOR HELP PROGRAMMING YOUR RADIO. NO.
Icom's radio communications protocol NEVER sends the password already in the radio back to the connected computer. I don't believe that anybody has ever seen that happen because there is no reason to allow the password to be revealed to the PC. Except, of course, for factory authorized service personnel to recover a radio that has a lost password. In that case my suspicion is that they tag into the EEPROM, dump its contents, and read the password directly.

If you knew what locations it was stored in, you might be able to read it out.

To try to find it, you could program in a distinctive known password, dump the EEPROM, and go searching for that particular password's pattern. After a few iterations you might be able to nail it every single time.
 
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