Is it possible for me to fix this corrupt display memory or is the radio mostly a loss. I know it will cost more than its worth to ship it off to be repaired. I try to deal with rat shack people as little as possible..
Assuming that is what is causing it (likely), I doubt it's worth it, though I dunno what these things look like inside. If you're at the point of scrapping it, wouldn't hurt to pull it apart and take a look, assuming you have an idea what you're looking at.
I can't say for sure because my background is not in radios, but I do have a lot of experience with embedded hardware, and usually displays like this work roughly the same way.
A little more background: the display is usually a bank of memory that holds enough bits to represent each character (or part of character for true dot matrix displays). Corrupted memory will change values, so the characters meant to be displayed will change. This might change to a static character (doesn't change once it becomes corrupted) or it could randomly change with no rhyme or reason.
If, instead, the characters are not changing as much as fading out and losing parts, this could also be related to the actual display itself, so the memory that holds the values to display might be fine, but the liquid crystal or whatever makes up the physical display is damaged.
Hope the info is helpful, but probably the outcome is the same, good chance it's cheaper to replace than repair.
Edit: also, static certainly kills a lot of memory, so in the future heeding MXER's advice is just good practice. I'm not sure how much good a firmware update is going to do, but it's certainly not going to hurt
