There are a number of inexpensive (< $30) HTs whose firmware has been reverse-engineered and made open-source, supporting dozens of new features, UI and performance improvements, CAT control, and programming from phone apps, PC apps and over USB-C or Bluetooth as well as K1 serial data lines. Those I know of are the Quansheng UV-K5/K6, TIDRADIO H3/H8, Radtel RT-890 and a number of similar variants.
Marcus of the TIDRADIO TD-H3 Hacking fb group has a programming tool with CAT control that can now enable COS output from the HT on the 2.5mm jack Ring.
Before this, the only way to get this information from an HT was to tap into the RX LED, but that is not fully reliable because HTs light the RX LED anytime any signal is received - even if CTCSS or DCS tone decode is enabled but the incoming signal does not have the proper tone. Thus any noise that happens to come in will light up the HT Rx LED and key the node but no audio will actually be there resulting in dead air being sent out to other AllStar nodes. The only other option was to use USBRadio VOX mode, which works pretty well but introduces significant delays in unkeying and does not stay keyed reliably if someone talks too quietly or pauses while talking.
Still new to these radios and various firmware distributions but I will be testing all this over the next week or so. If all goes well it should make it very quick and easy to build an AllStar node simply by plugging in an HT to any good-quality URI with no hardware mods or soldering required.
I’m now working on a URI product that will support this setup, with standard K1 2.5 & 3.5 mm TRS jacks supporting 1 or 2 HTs (half or full -duplex), along with a built-in high-efficiency regulator to power the HT(s) from a 9-16VDC input that also powers a MiniPC/RPi. Thus a simple and compact node can be put together with only a single power adapter or 12VDC input, an HT, an AllScan URI150 and computing device. Example pics below are with a URI200 which is the same form factor as the URI150 will be.
I was also looking into Quansheng HTs as according to https://github.com/egzumer/uv-k5-firmware-custom/files/13532694/BK4819.Registers_V1.1.pdf list of the RF SoC registers it should be easy to read COS status as well as read/write other potentially useful options (eg. selectable emphasis/deemphasis). In that case HTs could provide the same capabilities as a nicer mobile radio. I suspect the same or a similar RF SoC IC is used on many other HTs.
The following videos have more info on the H3 HTs and the custom firmware and programming/CAT tools. But this is all rapidly evolving tech and the above FB group has the latest info.
Oh! that’s cool!
I should look to see if any such thing has been done for the Quansheng UV-K5 & variants?
I just did hardware mods on such to make a node for PL+Carrier combined.
That’s what you need (COR&CTCSS) but what I’m seeing is COS (“busy” LED) which would act exactly like described: wrong. The worst thing is Carrier Squelch, followed closely by Carrier Squelch but muted. The only thing you should be doing is COR where it’s CSQ&CTCSS.
Introducing the AllScan ANH100, the next generation in AllStar node technology, bringing higher audio quality and more features at a lower price than any other node available.
The typical hardware modification to an HT disconnects the Serial TX from the K-Port and cross wires the RX LED to it to provide a COS output. This has the disadvantage on most radios of not accounting for the squelch tone (the LED will light on any present signal regardless of squelch tone), and also permanently disables the serial communication capability of the K-Port. My firmware solution repurposes the Serial TX GPIO to mirror the AF Amp power state (i.e. when squelch is open). This gives a true COS output with squelch tone, and can be configured in firmware settings to allow K-Port serial functionality again.
Any Baofeng or plenty of others can be used as an Allstar node if you’re willing to solder one transistor, one resistor and a wire. It brings an active low DC on the tip of the big plug. Look on wr2uhf.org and the link for the UV5R mod. Big pictures, takes a minute to load but worth it. Like you and others mentioned, takes the hi from the audio chip when COS/CTCSS/DCS is qualified, and inverts it.
Why not just use it as active high? The continuation of the active low “standard” beyond the age of 1990s analog circuitry never made sense to me… Just ends up causing a dead keyed system sooner or later.
True, but this mod takes advantage of the fact that there’s a DC bias on the tip to feed a mic. It’s resistor protected so there’s no harm in shorting it to ground and yet the mic still works when not needed as a node. You would have to give that up in order to provide an active high on that particular pin.
That being said, there is a phantom DC on the speaker output that can be used as COS if buffered, but then you’re making an interface anyway. The concern is that the DC on the the audio can be… unreliable? Depending on volume setting etc.
Marcus can respond on the question of Open Source better than I but as a software engineer and Free & Open-Source Software (FOSS) developer and advocate I doubt nicFW is intended to be closed-source. Marcus currently has 24 repositories on github, so he’s obviously not generally opposed to FOSS. If you were to ask for the source and had the ability to contribute to the development in a practical manner I would be very surprised if any of these sorts of projects would refuse to provide source code.
With big projects like M$ Windows or Linux the FOSS delineation is very clear but with small, fast-moving, highly innovative projects like nicFW and a number of similar projects sometimes context and practicality have to be considered. As Steve Jobs pointed out many years ago, software engineering is quite different from most other areas in that the most highly productive (“best”) engineers can be vastly more productive than the average. The stock H3 firmware and GUI looks like it was designed by a 10 year old, yet nicFW has improved upon that 100x and delivered a better GUI and more features than I have seen on any HT. He has done this in a short time-frame, with his FB group having already 11K+ members and with him supporting new feature requests on a daily basis.
If you wanted to add a new feature you could simply ask Marcus to implement it, in which case if it was in fact a good idea he’d probably have it done very quickly and it would work exactly like it should. Whether something is open-source or not, that’s something I really appreciate.
A FOSS-purist might say it has to be strictly open-source with a public github repo where anyone can do pull requests, forks, etc. But that does not always come for free ie. can be time-consuming to manage and can slow down innovation. Git is one of the biggest PITA RCS ever developed, not because the tech is bad but more because projects don’t properly document all their workflows and thus there are 1,000’s of combinations of git commands and the guidance provided for contributors is often very incomplete. So to do a simple thing that might take 1 top-notch developer a few hours can take a larger FOSS project weeks or months. FOSS is very important for many reasons, particularly for larger projects, but sometimes innovation can be even more important. In the case of the H3 it only has 64KB of flash and a tiny amount of RAM so there is just not a lot of code that can fit into it. Sometimes when one developer or a small team works at something long enough and gets in the “zone” they can do truly great work and it’s best to just let them do what they do best.
As far as HT firmware in general another issue is that as far as I know none of the mfrs have made any of their FW FOSS. If TIDRADIO were to do that the whole process would have been a lot easier and 1,000’s of hours of time would have been saved. But for various reasons the mfrs don’t want to do that, and so the real innovators have to reinvent the wheel. You then end up with a bunch of fragmented projects, forks, forks of forks, etc. all over github and elsewhere, but ultimately the most innovative of those rise to the top.
Thank you for putting in far more diplomatic terms what I would ever manage to. The fact is that there are specific reasons for it not being open-source currently, but it has always been my intention to eventually make it so. People can either accept that or not, if not, they can move on and find something else, or write an entire firmware from scratch themselves. But I find it highly offensive and insulting for these people to attack ME when all I’ve ever done is given to the community. The word “entitled” springs to mind.
