A very strange issue popped up using the built in serial port on the Dell Latitude D830 with docking station. When using the docking station serial port the radio will "lock-up" and require the cable to be disconnected to be programed.
If you want to flash the radio you need to put it in bootstrap mode. This is done using a flash adapter that puts the CPU (68HC11) into a special mode. The flash program loads a boot loader/flash application via the serial port and then writes the new image to flash chip.
This is the same as any other to modify to the amateur service from a software perspective. The issue is these radios are narrow band only on the receive path, as the 200 MHz band was never used for 25 KHz channels. Transmit will support wide band (and must be aligned for wide band first!) The IF filters simply need to be swapped with their wide band parts and wide band receive alignment performed.
Easy, the uP they use, a 68hc11, has a boot strap mode. What the CPU looks for at this point in bootstrap mode, is serial data loaded via XMODEM. In this 256 bytes of data, you load a program that can get the cpu going. Motorola loads the initial xmodem helper in bootstrap mode, then it loads a flash helper which is larger. This flash helper will write the flash chip on the radio. This is not a "bootloader" or anything like that, it's built into the CPU, and is well documented in the CPU datasheet.
These codeplugs are binary and have been edited for no serial number, 255 channels, 25-20-12.5 KHz deviation and signaling.Note when writing them using the CP tool you need to write 0x280-0x2ff. If you write the entire codeplug, you'll fuck up your radio. If you fuck it up, rewite your backup (you do have a backup, right?).
d0d94e66b7