While working on interfacing the UHF VXR-7000 radio to the URI, I realized that I needed to reprogram the transmitter.  It had previously been programmed to transmit a CTCSS of 100.0 Hz.  That’s fine but I want app_rpt to handle the tones so I can run multiple tones.

Several hours were lost attempting this.  Even after I located V1.07 of CE-27 software for programming the radio, I couldn’t get it to read with either dosemu or dosbox.  I have finally come to the conclusion that it is impossible to read the radio once you put in a frequency lower than 450 MHz.  The software views that as invalid data and thinks that the read has failed.  At least that’s my theory.  I can write to the radio just fine.

With the first USB to RS-233 cable I was using, which works fine with everything else, dosbox reports “Serial1: Desired serial mode not supported (9600,5,n,1)”.  Some chatter online indicates that this is unacceptable.  I grabbed another cable and that one does not give the error message.  Must be a different chipset, I haven’t bothered to look and am just using the cable that doesn’t have that error.

I then quit using dosbox and went back to dosemu.  I can write to the radio just fine.

In the software I hit F2 for common then F2 again.  Tab in and changed the low frequency for both tx and rx to 444.0  This allows me now to go back to the channel information and input my frequencies of 444.075 for tx and 449.075 for rx.  F6 will then send the program to the radio.  Again, I can write but not read.

Although I can save the program to disk, any attempt to read the program from disk crashes CE-27.  No hope of saving the values then.

Frustrating to say the least.  Although this radio functions well I can see an upgrade to MASTR III in the future just to avoid this crap.  Maybe next year.

Transmit is wonderful at this point.  I now need to make a modification to get proper discriminator audio.  I’ll work on that this evening.  Don’t fret, I’ll post the mods for all this, as well as the MASTR III setup, when I am finally done.  I just wanted to vent this frustration here and maybe it will help someone else.