Batboard

Alright, first off, I know this is a crazy idea and probably not worth a lot of time. But that's not helping my curiosity.

The Batlabs page on the ASTRO Saber makes an allusion to some radios displaying lowercase characters, which is apparently accomplished by manually editing the codeplug. This sounds like a lot of work, and a major PITA.

If we were interested in programming a lot of frequencies a little outside of what RSS would let us program, we wouldn't edit the codeplug by hand--we'd edit RSS to accept them.

Has anyone ever experimented with RSS in a hex editor enough to know how to manipulate what characters it accepts for a mode name? It sounds to me as if the radio is entirely capable of lowercase (in fact, doesn't the POST screen on an ASTRO Saber say "Self Test" instead of "SELF TEST"?), it's just that RSS won't accept them.

And how is the data stored in codeplug? I could see them 'dropping a bit' with each character by not differentiating between cases, but is that the case? Is anyone familiar enough with the 'lowercase' radios to know whether they did mixed-cased or if it was all lower? Are they manipulating a character table somewhere, or just changing the literal text stored for names?

I know this isn't exactly the most pressing thing going on in the radio world right now, but I'm awfully darn curious about it nonetheless. Someone here must have looked more into it than I.

I have seen a AS3 with lower case mode names. In fact, you CAN enter lower case letters in certain fields (like secure key names, etc).

As for where and what needs to be changed, I don't have a clue. Its been years since I played the modification game with RSS. All I know is that is supposely simple, and no one who had the radios would tell anyone how to do it (assuming that THEY knew).

Pj wrote:I have seen a AS3 with lower case mode names.

Do you recall whether they were ALL lowercase, or if it was mixed? I'm wondering, in general, how they're making the change.

What I gathered from Batlabs was that they simply hex-edited the codeplug. I'm looking at a codeplug listing mode names like "CHAN 5" and thinking I could just edit them to be lower/mixed case. Although I suppose you'd run into problems with checksums. (I also don't have the guts to write a hex-edited codeplug to my radio to see if it works.)

By the way, you'd have no idea how often strings of letters, in alphabetical order, come up in RSS when viewed with a hex editor.

The mode names were mixed... "Channel 1" and not "channel 1".


A few years ago, someone on the board alluded to the fact that he knew how to do it, but wasn't sharing with us either. Again, method unknown.

I almost want to say that Elroy may know of it, and may want to see if he chimes in...

The physical display is capable of showing lowercase letters.

The way to do it would be to remove the error checking of the zone/channel field. Or, find the code which does the validation on the text, and teach it that lowercase letters are allowed.

Just like you remove the error correction or change the parameters in the scan list hack that was mentioned.

Or, buy a 5k and call it done.

-Alex

alex wrote:buy a 5k and call it done.

-Alex

PROBLEM SOLVED!!!