Radioddity Radioddity GD-77 Firmware upgrade to add MDC1200? +OpenGD77 comments

[tropiradio]

Just recently purchased this radio on ebay for $85. It came with OEM FW v4.xxx (can't remember exact number), and then upgraded to v6.00.01 which seems to be the latest available at the Radioddity site. Pretty decent radio for the money, I'd say performs better than your average Baofeng toy radio.

I was wondering if there is any information about firmware upgrade that would add support for MDC1200 signaling, as is it will only support DTMF. Aside from my TRBO customers still also have several analog customers and since I purchased the GD77 as a second "admin/demo" radio (main radio for this task is a XPR7550) it would be useful for me to be able to have MDC on it as well. Also another problem is that several of my TRBO customer systems have RAS enabled, but guess that would be a long shot to hope for any semblance of it to ever show up in a low end radio like this. Also just wondering if there might be any workaround to RAS in order to at least being able to listen into the system calls with this radio.

BTW just this morning downloaded and checked out the OpenGD77 Firmware (from what seems to be the very last live links left) in hopes to find some useful additional features, but even though it jazzes up the display and a few other details, it is really mostly geared towards ham operators by simplifying the programming interface but in the process also removes some desirable commercial options (for example it removes text messages and privacy options). I really did not go much into this FW so almost immediately went back to the original v6.00.01 to get back the missing options.

Thank you in advance for any hints and comments.

 

[alcahuete]

There is no workaround for RAS (which is Motorola proprietary) or MDC1200.

OpenGD77 is geared toward ham operators, and will give you no useful features really as a commercial user, as you found out.

 

[tropiradio]

Yes agree RAS indeed is not going to happen, but MDC1200 as gone pretty much open source, or at least M is no longer enforcing their patents on it, so quite a few vendors are openly using it, Icom, Kenwood, even Hytera of all brands. For crying out loud they even call it "HDC1200" like in Hytera Data Communications, just swapped the M(otorola) for an H. So should be a no brainer for anyone able to code it into the existing firmware if there where interest. But then again the crowd that is buying this radio is mainly into it as a low cost entry platform to DMR.

 

[alcahuete]

Yes agree RAS indeed is not going to happen, but MDC1200 as gone pretty much open source, or at least M is no longer enforcing their patents on it, so quite a few vendors are openly using it, Icom, Kenwood, even Hytera of all brands. For crying out loud they even call it "HDC1200" like in Hytera Data Communications, just swapped the M(otorola) for an H. So should be a no brainer for anyone able to code it into the existing firmware if there where interest. But then again the crowd that is buying this radio is mainly into it as a low cost entry platform to DMR.

The problem is that there is no interest and nobody cares. Yes, it is technically a Part 90 commercial radio, but it is heavily marketed toward amateur radio. I would be willing to bet that 90% of the GD-77 market is amateur radio.

 

[tropiradio]

Yes of course, and again understandably the main GD-77 interest is in its DMR ham features.

BTW it should not be too difficult to circumvent RAS to be able to listen in. I can monitor my systems that have RAS enabled by using a RTL-SDR dongle with Airspy SDR# and the Simple DMR plugin. It probably just ignores the RAS headers. I'm guessing that adding that to the GD-77 FW would have been trivial, but again probably not many of the hams that coded it will be interested in that feature. Pity.

 

[alcahuete]

That's exactly what it's doing. That's what scanners do, and some radios (like certain Hytera models...maybe all? I don't remember). They just ignore the headers.

 

[tropiradio]

I wonder if there are any online resources that explain the RAS code structure in detail, or even MDC, that would give an insight to someone with the appropriate knowledge on how to code these features into existing firmware.