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Talking Back to That Port

A project log for Reverse Engineering The Midland WR120-EZ

Attempting to re-band the radio into the ham band as well as develop a tool for backup and restore via serial using the built-in clone port.

signals-everywherekr0sivSignals Everywhere/KR0SIV 07/20/2017 at 05:582 Comments

Time to talk to the serial port!

After listen to what the serial port had to save I've put together enough to figure out what I need to say to the radio to get it to start entering LOAD mode.

Sending the hex bytes 0xEE get things started.

Serial port capture

Python code snip

The radio does enter LOAD mode


A little problem

After successfully writing commands to enter LOAD mode (the first step to software based restoration of settings) I found that when I have the UART attached to the RX pin on the radio it no longer just spits out data but rather waits for me to send another command back, I'll have to do some more digging.

When the UART is connected to the radio's RX pin it doesn't like to talk as much.

Next Time?

The next update with any luck should be an opensource application to backup and restore these radios. Once I manage to decode the data (likely by making small setting changes or dumping the winbond chip I should be able to allow modification of saved settings from a computer, allowing you to program these alert radios without having punch everything in by hand.

Discussions

James wrote 06/03/2023 at 21:31 point

Would *love* to see/hear your results if you had a chance to finish this project. Just got my hands on one of these and I’ve been curious about that port!

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minecratfd8 wrote 04/26/2018 at 22:52 point

will there ever be software posted? I'd love to try this myself.

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