Wouxun KGUVD1P

[RadioGuy3007]

My Wouxun keeps deleting all of my channels when I power it on and off. Is there a setting to turn this off?

 

[joeuser]

This is a glitch in the radio itself, its not a setting you're missing. Search the Net & you will see you're not alone & its a mystery!

 

[n5ims]

Not much of a mystery according to one of their (former) largest importers, wouxun.us (full information here --> Good-Bye-Wouxun). According to that page, it appears that the radios were made with very low quality flash rom that only lasted a very few write cycles. Once you exceeded this number of write cycles the radio started having issues.

Wouxun has always had problems with their dual band HT radios. The biggest problem for me was a “memory loss” problem. This problem would occur suddenly for no known reason. Such a radio would boot up speaking Chinese and the memory channels would no longer show a channel name, it would only show the channel number. Sometimes, the channels would totally disappear from the programming. Reprogramming the radio by computer would restore the English and channel names but this would not last long. Sometimes it would last a day or week but more often it would reoccur with the next off/on cycle.

Note, this quote was edited to correct formatting issues to make it easier to read.

Flash memory is memory that keeps its contents when powered off, like an SD card that you use in a camera. Regular memory (DRAM) requires power to keep its contents, which is why your computer has to boot up each time you power it on.

All flash memory is rated at a certain number of write cycles. That means after a certain number of writes, it will "die", meaning it can't be written to any more. The actual time and number of cycles it takes to kill the flash depends on both the access patterns and the quality of the flash. For example, a cheap SD card may be rated for only 1000 cycles before it dies. The new (very expensive) solid state disks use flash memory as well, but very very nice memory, and are rated for millions of writes.

I expect that the flash used in these radios is, like everything else, as cheap as it can possibly be, which means it is probably rated for very few writes. If they designed the radio to be reprogrammed once a year or so for LMR type situations, the average ham may wear it out in a month, as you can imagine.

Another thing to consider is that the radio itself writes to the flash for certain things, such as tuning the VFO. That is extra hard on the flash because it's a repeated write to the same cell over and over
again.

It's possible that if your radio is still under warranty, you may be able to have your dealer fix it for you. Warranty support is a huge sticking point with the dealers though since they are to handle the full costs of those repairs (based on the wouxun.us supplied information) so support may be hit or miss. http://wouxun.us/

Due to lack of factory support on warranty issues, we will no longer sell Wouxun radios after our present inventory is gone.

 

[nd5y]

This page shows how to fix it by replacing the bad memory IC. Wouxun Memory Loss Lost Repair Page