Chirp Beta Driver for Radtel RT-490 posted yesterday at danplanet Click here for link to download Chirp RT-490 Driver
The Chirp development team posted the RT-490 driver yesterday 2022/May/6. Currently it is available as a developer 'Load Function' and should be incorporated in the production Chirp release soon. The Chirp driver and Instructions on how to do 'Load Function' in Chirp are at the link above.
As many have observed the RT-490 is an identical clone to the MMLradio JC-8629 and others. The Chirp test team tested the Chirp driver on the following radios (all worked identical, no special tweaks were required for any of these models). All have been added in as supported models (Example: When in Chirp doing a radio read, the drop now includes Radtel, then for Model RT-490).
The Chirp RT-490 included testing where Chirp radio writes were read back into both the vendor's Multiband software and the Super Walkie Talkie Bluetooth APK for confirmation that settings remained the same and that no bad bits caused any problems. Likewise, Excel imports and exports also worked perfect.
Testing included taking a radio that is NOT a clone to these (used a Baofeng UV-5R) to load and importing its memory collections into the Radtel and others (Perfect). Saving and swapping Channel collections works great. Used the standard 2-pin K-style programming cable plugged into the RT490 and did a write, moved the cable to the MML JC8629 and did the same write (actually moved that cable back and forth across multiple radios many times).
During the driver build the team validated additional settings that were not available in the other software. So after testing, those were added (a simple example is in addition to selecting FM Radio On or Off, a field was added so a radio station can be specified in settings).
Lastly, another good thing that came out of this process is that the team was able to identify the settings necessary to have up to 10 of these radios programmed as a group capable of doing real-time GPS updates within the group (this may be analog APRS).
- Radtel RT-490
- MMLradio JC-8629
- JJCC JC-8629
- Socotran FB/JC-8629
- Boristone 8RS
- HamGeek HG590
- Jianpai 8800 Plus (new model has USB-C charging)
- Abbree AR-869 (new model has USB-C charging)