Thursday, November 3, 2011

Programmed... I think

Ok, the WOUXON UVD1P (made in China) seems to be a nice little piece of hardware, but I have to say that the software and documentation SUX!

After downloading the installer from the WOUXON website (I downloaded EVERYTHING that might be related to my radio), I finally figured out what had to be the appropriate software.  It looks like when they made the micro-CD that was packaged with the PC connecter cord, they included the driver installers, but didn't bother to include the actual software.  In case anyone is trying to puzzle it out, the appropriate file is KG-UVD1P V2.11. This is an executable, and doesn't need to be installed.

Once I hooked up the radio to the PC using the connector cord, I launched the program.  VERY poorly implemented GUI.  Toolbar didn't have tooltips, and the icons were small (16x16) and not especially informative.  The menu bar was slightly better, but only slightly.  The help file wasn't that great, and didn't correspond with labels in the program all that well.  The two critical buttons were upload and download, and of course these were the least clear icons. 

The main window of the radio programming software was a spreadsheet format table, with columns labeled along the top, and numbered down the left side.  I finally figured out that the numbers were channel numbers.  RxFreq and TxFreq turned out to be Receive and Send Frequencies, which is kind of weird because when programming the radio by  hand (as I noted, this was a pain), you set the Send frequency, and then an offset, up or down for the Receive.  I guess the way this tool does it is better.  The remaining columns provide other settings, not all of which I've figured out.  One I especially WANT to figure out but haven't is the one that sends a repeater a tone.

Of course, I didn't get all this set up last night until after the time people were supposed to be using the nets.  Since I wanted to listen to things a while before transmitting, I'll be listening again tonight.  Hopefully I've got it set up right.

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