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Wouxun UV8D and the "Suicide Chip"

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KD8DVR

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Has anyone opened their radios to determine if the New UV8D and 9D radios have the "suicide chip" that causes failure after it fails. The chip is the 24C64 EEPROM. It is alleged that ALL of these chips regardless of manufacturer will fail as they have a limit to the number of read-write cycles.

As a refresher: Most Wouxun radios will write out their memory to the 24C64 upon power off and do a read from the same chip upon power on. As a result the chip fails; due to this action after a number of power cycles.


If the new Wouxun radios also have this chip; it is entirely possble these radios will fail in the same fashion as the UVD(X)P series radios.
 

XTS3000

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The 24C64 according to its data sheet will do 1,000,000 erase/write cycles guaranteed.
 

n5ims

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The 24C64 according to its data sheet will do 1,000,000 erase/write cycles guaranteed.

Are those specs for the Chinese knock-off version reportedly used in the radios or for the name brand version(s)? I've seen posts where the version used by Wouxun may allow for as few as 1,000 write cycles, perhaps even less.
 

robertmac

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Not up to a million on off cycles on a couple of Wouxuns, but am well over 1000 and never had a problem yet.
 

KT0DD

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Is Wouxun the only one with the suicide chip?

Is Wouxun the only one that supposedly has this issue or do all Chinese HT's have this issue?
 

baltimorecs

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We have heavily used sixteen UVD-1Ps and UV-6Ds for several years and have not run into this issue. I wonder if the issue was due to mods requested for the US versions to be sold here. We have gotten all of ours from HK. But I don't know the sourcing of models that have had memory issues.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 

Titan520

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I think its more a software issue than a hardware issue. Some puxing have the same chip and they arent dying left and right. Just the wouxuns.

A chip like this should no be treated like it is in the wouxuns. It should only be written to when its programmed. Not on every power cycle.
 

nd5y

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Not up to a million on off cycles on a couple of Wouxuns, but am well over 1000 and never had a problem yet.
The way I understand it, it's not how many times you program the radio, it's how many times the radio writes the memory while in use and what section of the memory goes bad.

I have a UV2D that after about 2 years started showing weird stuff on the display occasionally when switching from frequency mode to channel mode. Immediately changing channels fixes it. Power cycling when it is in the weird display state causes it to lose all programming. The exact failure symptoms probably also varies depending on what section of the memory goes bad.
 
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