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nicFW880 V5.08.01B [Release]

🕑 Added 2025-11-07 14:49:23 +0000 UTC

Comments

Marcus Dudley

No, i tried to keep the logging to a minimum as it's in RAM

Kelvin Hill

Another APRS question. Is there a mechanism which allows a logged beacon to be examined in more detail, in order to see the paths etc?

Wayne WA2N

Question on saving waypoints and navigating to them. Is it correct to save your current location you SP green, select GPS, select Point Save and pick a memory location that's free? Then to navigate to that waypoint, use SP green, select GPS, select Point Load and select an in-use memory? When I do that the waypoint lat / lng appears to be roughly correct at the bottom of the screen in "data mode" but in Tracker / compass mode the waypoint shows Far 270(W) when in fact it should be within 1000 feet from my current location at 35 degrees, 27.42951 N, 83 degrees 02.29101 W. If I long press green and select Waypoints in the menu and press green to cycle through a few of them saved at the same spot, and also one I used the OSM Maps and RMS to save near Asheville North Carolina 40 miles to the east, the lat / long appears again to be roughly correct, but the madenhead locator shows KM35hl which is near the country Greece at Latitude: 35∘28′45′′N (35.4792∘N),Longitude: 26∘37′30′′E (26.6250∘E) per Google Gemini. I wonder if there's an issue with negative longitude calculations? Am I doing this correctly? Have 5.08.01B loaded. Thanks Marcus

Marcus Dudley

That's not so easy to do, it's far easier to simply suppress the relay rather than have a bunch of looping spaghetti code feeding back from the filter function in order to tell the scan function to skip. If I could have easily done that, I would have done.

Eric Black

I like the recent feature that if you scan a group of channels, it won't keep changing the relay for different frequency ranges--it only receives frequencies in the same range as the last selected channel. However, I noticed that while scanning it still scans through all the other channels/frequencies that cannot be received. It would be helpful if it skipped those channels completely. Otherwise, it's not obvious which ones are actually being scanned and it's wasting time on ones it can't currently receive.

Fabio Zoppi

Thanks Marcus :-)

Marcus Dudley

If you're listening to a signal that's THAT weak, you shouldn't be using squelch anyway. Squelch tail is not and has never been an integer, it represents the length of the tail in seconds. Squelch tail however will not help if the signal is vanishing into the noise. But as I said, with signals like that, you don't use squelch, radio operation 101.

Wayne WA2N

Today I was listening to a repeater that was pretty weak, in and out of the noise and the squelch closed too quickly with the signal dips. Looking at the settings in the manual, it seems like Squelch Tail (Tail in the Manu) might be of some help. I checked my settings tonight and that value both in the RMS and radio is 0.6. Based on the documents this should be an integer value, the example setting is 3. I got the "defaults" from a new RMS load and used those rather than reading the radio after a Emerg reset after firmware load since some of those other settings looked out of place. Can you give us some squelch settings that work well for you to start with? My present values are in parens: Squelch Level (3), Noise Trigger(48), Noise Hysteresis(4), RSSI Hysteresis(4), Throttle(5), Noise Ceiling(60), Tail Elimination(Off), Squelch Tail(0.6). Generally, these seem too tight. Possibly a "reset to default" button would be useful for these and other settings? Thanks, Wayne

Marcus Dudley

The 880 just takes longer to get enough of a signal to reliably make a scanning decision. However, getting the Ultrascan value right matters and it can vary from device to device. I find 12 to to best for mine.

David

Quick question - on your H3 / 890 / 900 FW, the scanning speed was blazingly quick, I don't know how much of that was down to not updating the display as the frequency changed during scanning (or I mean there was an option "scan update" that allowed control over the how often the display updated)? On the 880 I don't see that option - the scanning feels slower, I don't know if it the cause or if there is something else? It's not a big issue for me, just curious more than anything.

Marcus Dudley

Long press 1-9 to set a trigger level and a regular scan in nicFW is MUCH faster than the scope and can cover MUCH more frequency space. If you want to listen to signals, use a normal scan, it's way better and actually MEANT for that purpose.

Robert Moskovic

I must say I am missing the monitoring/listening function of the original spectrum feature. I used it for quick scaning through a band that I choose. I think regular scaning is way slower that way, although quicker in nicFW, and there is no stop and listen as long as there is reception (TO, CO, SE settings on the other HTs). Am I missing something?

Robert Moskovic

It confused me also. You can turn it off by setting Heartbeat setting to Off. Normally this would be a led indicator signaling that radio is on. Not sure why is that way.

diego serrano serrano

I've updated to the latest release. The RT880G walkie-talkie arrived today, but when it's on standby, the keypad backlight flashes briefly every 10 seconds. Is this normal?

Marcus Dudley

1. You can already do this by selecting a block of channels then right clicking and selecting "Up" or "Down" 2. Good idea.

Fabio Zoppi

New ... NicFW880_RMS v5.08.01AA ... Well done ! Thanks Marcus :-) Request of two small feature additions for RMS: 1- Channel list - edit ability to insert blank lines to facilitate quick and/or additions to the list (Insert one or more lines with multiple selections); 2- Time synchronization with PC time

Wayne WA2N

AA Works without any editing once imported into RT-920 Chirp! You 'da man Marcus

Marcus Dudley

Likely a sector boundary violation. For now avoid using channel numbers that cause this. I'll attempt a fix next update.

Marcus Dudley

Fixed next update.

Marcus Dudley

That is a problem with the 920 chirp importer. Cross mode is a perfectly valid way to encode subtone, it's not my fault if others don't write their importers properly and I can't test everyone's broken chirp importers.

Eric Balandraud

Great, parameters and shirp export, very good, is that i expect

Wayne WA2N

I don't think you can do it directly. I populated mine by importing a chirp formatted file from the RT-920 which has a chirp driver. Alternatively I think you can program a few channels and save to a csv file from the RMS then manually cut / paste from the original firmware's CSV file using the same formatting.

Robert Moskovic

I am unable to find it here on forum, what is the easiest way to transfer data from original FW (channels, zones) to nicFW? Thanks

Wayne WA2N

I've found a few other problems with the chirp export. For channels where I have transmit ctss (only) the Tone Mode is set to Cross and Cross Mode is set to Tone-> which won't import into my RT-920 which is one of the only other Radtel radios that has a chirp driver. In the zip file I sent you a link to I've updated it to include a screenshot of what the chirp driver shows when your chirp export file is loaded. Also FM get translated to WFM. See wfm and cross.png in the revised chirp errors.zip on the google drive link I sent. I understand what a PIA writing a chirp export is, thanks for doing it.

Aat van den Bos

When exporting to a chirp CSV file AM becomes WAM. WAM is unknown to chirp, changed it to AM than it works.

Wayne WA2N

Importing chirp file into latest Chirp shows import error Line XX: [offset] invalid literal for int() with base 10: ' off'. I sent you a message with a link to my channels.csv, chirp.csv, and the latest chirp windows installer that I just downloaded tonight and a couple screenshots to help you debug. Several lines did import, I'm not sure what's triggering the error.

Marcus Dudley

Fixed next update.

Fabio Zoppi

Just a service tip for exporting the channel list in CSV format for CHIRP! Be careful not to leave the TX Power field set to N/T, otherwise the channel data will not be imported by CHIRP, which will return an import error in the data field (such as when exporting channels in the AIR band). In this case, you must first set them to RMS with a TX Power value of "Zero". ... Cheers :-)

Wayne WA2N

Thanks for the update (chirp chirp). I noticed after flashing (and booting with top emerg button pressed and rebooting) that not all the settings get written to the radio using the codeplug write settings. Then I wrote using the settings RMS menu a couple times and they transferred. Popup flash time written to radio is 1/10th the value in the RMS (3 seconds results in 0.3 seconds on radio).

Marcus Dudley

Yes To state this again, The radio manufacturers can test and write calibration data to each radio as it rolls off the production line. I cannot do this obviously, unless I jump into a private jet, fly around the world and visit every radio owner and calibrate each one personally, or invent a time-machine, go back to the moment each unit rolled off the line and calibrate them then. So calibration is down to the user as I do not know where the factory calibration data is written to or what format it is in.

Marcus Dudley

No idea, I don't have a Mac. Other MAC users will need to figure out why and advise me.

Robert Moskovic

Unfortunately RMS for MacOS is not working. I tried everything, removing it from quarantine, self signing, gatekeeper disabled, nothing works. Im on Intel MacBook Pro 14.8.2 MacOS How we can fix this issue?

Eric Balandraud

Just a question : i see in your post how to calibrate, it is nescessary ?

Marcus Dudley

RMS can ONLY be used with nicFW, and when flashing nicFW with the firmware tab it's SUPPOSED to say timeout. There is a documentation collection here and there are videos showing how to use the RMS.

Samuel

Hi, sorry are there instructions for using the rms? When I try to read in win11 I get "serial communication error", I have used radtel's cps and firmware update on this before. Trying to flash firmware I get "com port timeout"

Marcus Dudley

The message (comment) gets cut off because I don't have room to display it all. Also some pakets are quite large, I don't have enough RAM to store everything.

medal.bricks

Congratulations on coming out of beta! Still the best custom firmware I’ve ever worked with (and I’ve used FlipperZero stuff, and UV-K5’s) Is there any chance a “raw” packet view option is possible for APRS? Many times the message text gets cuts off when looking at a beacons, and I think being able to see the unformatted packet text/data could be a simple solution. But I don’t code, so I have no idea lol. Thanks again! You rock!!!🤘

Marcus Dudley

" but after sitting turned off for a while, a garbled data-like noise is heard on the other users radio when I transmit" How can you transmit if the radio is turned off? Also you haven't followed the bug report procedure. I need a set of instructions to make MY RADIO do the same as yours. You need to reset the radio fully. Then document each step EXACTLY you take to produce the problem. No vagueness, exact times, exact processes.

David Baker

I'm experiencing an issue with my RT-880G using both the current and last beta firmware. The radio functions normally after flashing, but after sitting turned off for a while, when I turn it back on a garbled data-like noise is heard on the other users radio when I transmit. It sounds similar to a data transmission. I've tried erasing the radio, which temporarily resolves the issue. The only solution I've found is to disable the GPS, which stops the noise. I was hoping this new firmware release would address this, but unfortunately, it hasn't. I can share a video if you'd like to hear the sound. Thanks for all your hard work, Marcus!

Marco Schneider

BTW: Scrambler works fine now. 👍🏻

Marco Schneider

Hey Marcus. Thank you very much! for V5.08.01. It's working so far. I'm always stuck in the CB radio trap. si chip is not able to do NFM RX on 11m band/27 mhz. I hate si chip for it. LOL. The only error I found - in version before, too - is this: If I'm holding up/down on HT all the time there is an 4038/62 error on display at channel 186 in my case. Is it a corrupt entry in CSV/channel list? I didn't found any difference to all other chans before or after 186....

Marcus Dudley

I'll see how it can implemented, everyone and his dog need something different when it comes to scanning, and I have to make sure it doesn't get too convoluted with keys and options.

Chris Clifton

I love the fact someone asks for maidenhead locator and as if by magic you add it to the GPS screen. I was looking at APRS thinking it'd show the locator there thinking something was broken then opened the GPS menu and saw the locator. I couldn't see the point before but often when you're in the middle of nowhere on a big hill people will ask your locator and sometimes you have radio but no data signal so this is absolutely brilliant. I couldn't see why it was useful before but the way you've implemented it is great.

Chris Clifton

I've got to try this. The other night I was testing using the handheld as a relay for APRS but it wouldn't resend transmissions it heard. I need to try some more now you've said this. Original firmware I had it working as a digipeater (all be it a not very good one) for a short while.

Marcus Dudley

Probably uninitialized memory, I'll try zeroing it on startup fo next release.

Rainer Heisser

V5.08.01 läuft so wie ich das bisher sehe in allen meinen Bereichen fehlerfrei. Eine Anmerkung habe ich aber doch, bei Weather habe ich -17 Grad als angezeigte Temeperatur ohne das ich Daten dazu empfangen hätte.

Detlef Fenske

This is great work. Thank you so much. The functionality of the firmware and the CPS software is amazing for an analog radio.

SP3LOR

A perfect factory firmware update to nicFW880 V5.08.01. So far, let's just say everything is working. We even changed the digipeter path to WIDE1-1, which causes our sent APRS frame to be returned from the digipeter as an acknowledgment. Thank you, Marcus

Razvan Savin

Hi Marcus, currently when you stop a scan it stops at the last scanned channel. Could it be made so that when you cancel a scan (by pressing the scan button again) it would revert to the initial channel you started the scan from ? I have a list of channels with a main channel and some secondary channels I like to scan for activity. I would like to be able to revert to the initial main channel if during the scan there is no activity on the secondary channels.

Marco Schneider

Huh? The new RMS needs .dot net? On Mint? ./NicFW880_RMS You must install .NET to run this application. App: /home/superuser/Dokumente/880/linux-x64/NicFW880_RMS Architecture: x64 App host version: 8.0.21 .NET location: Not found Learn more: https://aka.ms/dotnet/app-launch-failed Download the .NET runtime: https://aka.ms/dotnet-core-applaunch?missing_runtime=true&arch=x64&rid=linux-x64&os=linuxmint.21&apphost_version=8.0.21 Failed to resolve libhostfxr.so [not found]. Error code: 0x80008083 OLD: file NicFW880_RMS NicFW880_RMS: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=10a1a8118ad0641e5c186e8ae6ac02cdce58a837, stripped NEW: file NicFW880_RMS NicFW880_RMS: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=caa544b7a50373624331efefb4eba65ad8d87ceb, stripped