The new radio search, part two...

Well, it's been an interesting couple of weeks. I've been doing some research into radios, and had decided that I wanted a quad-band radio. I also wanted to buy it in person, not online: There are two reasons for this;

1.  It's my version of shopping therapy and instant shopping gratification.
   (Women do shoes, I do radio kit!)
2. It ensures that I can ask the questions I want answered at the time, by someone knowledgeable on the topic close to where I live (well, relatively close, the other side of London from me, in this case), and not someone cribbing off a cheat sheet at a customer service desk in, potentially, a far off land. I do prefer to shop for my stuff in this country, where possible. Helps the economy, and so on ;)

So. I'd finally short-listed three radios: The Yaesu FT-8900 and FT-857D radios, and the Wouxun KG-UV950P.  The first and last of these are both quad-band FM radios, able to operate on 10m, 6m, 2m, and 70cm; the FT-857 is an all bands HF (160m) through to VHF and UHF (70cm) (not VHF 4m though), and multi-mode as well.

In addition, the 857 can be operated via a BlueCAT bluetooth adaptor (which I already have for my FT-817 portable all-band, all-mode, low-power radio) to be operated through a couple of apps on my Android phone. However, costs are interesting.

All in, the Wouxun is cheapest, then the 8900, then the 857. So, cost alone suggests that the Wouxun would be ideal for my purposes; the reviews on the radio, especially the one here, suggest it's a good contender for the more expensive Yaesu FT-8900.

The problem was that my preferred option for programming such a radio, CHIRP, does not yet support this radio. Which means that I'd need to use the factory software, and somehow connect via a USB cable to the radio from the Linux computer from within WINE.

This was something of a show-stopper for the Wouxun, as I'd need to be able to program severs dozen - possibly a couple of hundred - memory channels before being able to effectively use the radio; without the ability to connect a computer to the radio, in order to perform this programming, meant that if I got the radio, I'd have to do it manually, though the radio itself, reportedly a saga-like task, and VERY time consuming.

Then I had an OHO moment...

Now, most people will tell you that connecting to a USB port from within WINE is a nightmare of migraine-inducing proportions. Well, I believed them too - until I checked. There's a very helpful article written by G8OGJ, which details how to get USB ports recognised under WINE. You can find the article noted here (it's a PDF download from his site, go there and click on his link!).

It transpires that all I had to do was check which port my FTDI cable was mirrored to: It seems that somehow (and I'm not look a gift-horse in the mouth here) the cable was automatically mapped to a com port under WINE - All I had to do was confirm which COM port it would map to, and I did this with the "ls -al /dev/ttyU*" command from within Terminal - I didn't need to do anything else at all.

For those interested to know, here's the Terminal blurb (non-pertinent details redacted, of course)...

roger@REDACTED:~$ cd ~/.wine/dosdevices
roger@REDACTED:~/.wine/dosdevices$ ls -al
total 8
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
lrwxrwxrwx 1 roger roger   12 Jan 14 01:55 com1 -> /dev/ttyUSB0
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED

Somehow, and I don't know how or when precisely, I made a permanent mapping to the USB ports as COM1!

I was beginning to grin, here, I have to tell you.


However, there was still one itty-bitty problem.

Given a review I saw on the programming software from Wouxun elsewhere, which said that while it installed ok, it crashed on running under WINE (review), I was under the impression that what I'd read was pretty much the end of the story. This said, and still on a bit of a success high from the USB revelation, I decided to check this out as well.

It turns out that while his version, for 2.5k channel spacing, might be iffy under WINE, the British-specific version, with 5k channel spacing, does not have those issues,

It installed with no problems under WINE, and likewise ran up successfully, albeit with no radio connected).

So, it very much looks like the Wouxun KG-UV950P is back in the running!

I'm planning on visiting ML&S if I have the time tomorrow, so I'll keep you updated :)