How qdmr/dmrconf detects radios

[hmatuschek]

There is a auto-detection scheme, that qdmr and dmrconf use to find and identify a radio. This is a two-step process

1. qdmr/dmrconf searches the list of connected USB devices for a VID/PID combination known to belong to a radio.
2. Try to talk to the radio and identify the exact model and sometimes firmware version.

There are some radios that are not auto-detectable, because one of the two steps are not reliable or even dangerous. For example

• The DR-1801UV uses a generic USB CDC-ACM chip inside the cable that can be used by other radios and even other USB devices. More over, there appears to be a set of different chips being used for these cables. So, there is not a unique VID/PID combination for these radios. However, once the interface to the radio is known, the device can be identified by talking to it.

• The RT73 / DB25-D / CDR-300UV is even worse. Not only uses it a generic USB CDC-ACM chip too, but the protocol does not allow for any identification of the radio before reading or writing a codeplug. In this case, the user has to specify the interface and the radio model before qdmr/dmrconf can talk to it safely.

So, when the auto-detection fails but a serial port is found, qdmr will ask for the serial port and model, that is connected to it. This way, you can still talk to it.

Using the command line tool, you have to specify the interace with the -D or --device option. E.g., --device=ttyUSB0 and (optionally) the radio model if it cannot be detected using the -R or --radio option. That is, to read the codeplug from a DR-1801UV connected to /dev/ttyUSB0, you may call

 dmrconf read --device=ttyUSB0 --radio=dr1801uv codeplug.yaml

although the radio option is not strictly needed here, as the device is identifiable.