Untypical post today, but as a 90’s kid and a huge nerd I couldn’t resist skateboarding in my life. So I recently re-discovered this wonderful sport and re-entered with a pretty new flavor. As an old fart in the field – just turned 40 this year – I decided to go with a surfskate. Especially…
Author: Alex
Reverse Engineering Radios – ARM Binary Images in IDA Pro
In this article I will demonstrate how to start a basic analysis of an ARM firmware image. As an example we will take a look into the widely available firmware of ANYTONE 878UVII radios. The techniques explained in this article can also be used for other ARM based firmware and for images of a wide…
ANYTONE Factory Settings Mode and Serial Communication (USB)
The ANYTONE 878UV and most likely most other radios based on the same firmware have a secret factory settings mode. This mode is already know as “full test / self adjustment mode”. Details about it can be found here. This mode allows the a technician to fine tune various settings within the firmware. The currently…
FT8 – Grid Locators and “Special Calls”
As I was traveling to LY recently I asked myself – why won’t JTDX add the location prefix to my calls on FT8? It just shows “CQ LY/DO1ALX”. I looked into the code and it looked promising on the first glace. After a few changes I tried to send a CQ with locator but it…
Card-Sort Robot
Everyone who knows me finds out that I have a strange dedication to trading cards from the 90s. A long time ago I made a private project to detect cards by image recognition. The project is sort of unique until today and during the last Corona winter my buddy Christian Walter picked up the idea…
DO0ZA is alive!
I am happy to announce that my 2m APRS digipeater and 70cm NPR HAMNet Gateway was approved by the Bundesnetzagentur. It was assigned the callsign DO0ZA. The 2m APRS part is already on air. The NPR part will follow soon. Since I love new and experimental technology, a LORA Aprs iGate is also present at…
On Air from Lithuania as LY/DO1ALX
I was visiting the family of my wife last week. As you might guess my wife is from Lithuania. Now after Corona withdraws a bit, we could finally visit her family and this beautiful country again. We haven’t been there for more than 2 years now and this time I took my HAM stuff with…
Building an APRS Digipeater based on a Motorola GM350 and Dire Wolf
It all started with my friend DK2HM bugging me about APRS for a while. First I wasn’t really interested since I considered packet to be somehow a old protocol. But after taking a few more looks into the protocol specs and APRS it somehow catched my interest. This was somehow the moment when my digipeater…
Programming the Motorola GM350 on Windows 10
Since I am totally into these Motorola devices at the moment I picked up a GM350 and looked into the programming of these devices. It is simpler as expected. The setup is pretty much the same I used for the GM950 models. All you need is a different programming software. You can find the software…
