M17 Experimenting

Since about a year or so I had a couple of MD-380 handheld radios lying around, for the purpose of modifying them to M17 radios based on openRTX.

Due to time-constraints this had not happened yet, or at least an earlier attempt didnt work out and I “paused” the project untill I had some more time to work on this topic.

Triggered by the fact that ConnectSystems now released the first commercial M17 radios here, running OpenRTX:

https://www.connectsystems.com/amateur-products/CS7000-M17.html

and here:

https://www.connectsystems.com/amateur-products/CS7000-M17-plus.html

I found the price a little to high especially as I had several MD380’s ready to be modified and flashed.

The OpenRTX Manual they wrote is kinda nice though and it explains all/the few settings on the OpenRTX radio quite nicely:

https://www.connectsystems.com/products/top/radios/CS7000_M17/Using%20the%20CS7000%20M17%20Radio.pdf

Modifying the MD-380 hardware

So, first to modify the MD-380. I used the steps as described on the OpenRTX pages:

https://openrtx.org/#/M17/md380_mods

This mod is fairly simple, takes about 90 minutes to do it properly. A small-tip soldering iron, a steady hand and a 51k smd resistor did the job..

Flashing the OpenRTX firmware

This was a bit tricky to get working. I tried to flash the latest two available OpenTRX versions, which blanked my MD380.

I found that flashing the firmware after the 0.3.5 release did not work anymore by using the manufacturer firmware upgrade tool, as the user guide says. Or most other tools didnt work either.

The only Windows flash-tool I found working properly was the TyteraFlashToolv3.00-NL which I found here:

https://github.com/DMR-Database/database-tools

I used the latest nightly firmware build which I got here:

https://files.openrtx.org/nightly

or here:

https://openrtx.schinken-radio.de/nightly

The pre-release builds can be downloaded here:

https://github.com/OpenRTX/OpenRTX/releases

After flashing your MD-380 starts OPNRTX