I own both the RT-1000 Pro and the RT-950 Pro and have been doing a deep dive into the RT-1000 Pro over the past week or so. Having been playing with the 1000, I don't think I could recommend purchasing it over the 950 Pro due to what I believe to be a regression in features.
Just got word from Radtel's support that the 1000 does
not support cross-band repeat by itself - it instead requires two radios and a cable linking them. The 1000 also lacks bluetooth and, while the USB-C charging is nice, Radtel decided to provide the same proprietary programming cable and slap a USB-C connector on the end with a custom pin-out instead of using the GP328Plus connector the 950 Pro has.
I am still investigating the radio's actual capabilities (possibly not built into the factory firmware), but I'd say that out of the gate, the 950 Pro offers more bang for your buck. Also, Radtel's support seems to go back and forth in my emails to them regarding features, so time will tell as this radio matures. As of right now, I can confirm that the factory firmware does not bring up a second transceiver chip. I haven't taken the radio completely apart yet, so don't have a visual transciever count yet - the transceiver(s) are on the front of the main board and I haven't had time to de-solder the antenna from it. As mentioned in another post, the main board has a "UV100" slikscreen marking.
AM TX on 27 MHz does work on the bench, but I haven't tested it practically. Since the BK48xx series only supported FM, there is additional front end circuitry that generates AM using a blank carrier from the BK48xx SDR transeiver (done by disabling FM deviation) and the microphone.
APRS "works" and I would say it's about the same quality implementation-wise as could be expected from a radio like this. The radio allows you to set an APRS slot (A/B/C) and will use that slot for RX/TX. There is one caveat: Sending a manual APRS beacon uses your currently selected slot, not the slot you specified for APRS. I submitted this as a bug to Radtel and it seems like they will be addressing it in a future firmware update.
Airband TX is firmware gated, codeplug modifications will not suffice to open that up.
Here are some power output observations (SW-33PLUS power meter with dummy load):
Low @446.0 MHz: 3.3W
High @ 446.0 MHz: 6.0W
Low @146.52 MHz: 3.4W
High @146.52 MHz: 7.06W
I have built an experimental CHIRP plugin for the radio which can be found here:
GitHub - RevEngOps/CHIRP-Radtel-RT-1000-Pro-Plugin: A go at supporting new Radtel RT-1000 Pro in CHIRP.. It's a work in progress, so some features may work, others may not, and others may break the radio. I have been using it to configure channels and zones and, during development, I did corrupt the codeplug. The radio prompted me to initialize it on reboot and I was back to a "factory reset" state.
