CHIRP

CHRIP is a very useful application used to program numerous brands of radios.

The Chirp web site is here

Recommendations

It is recommended for most up to date features and radio compatibility that the Chirp daily build be used as described here:

http://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Download

Known Issues

Baufeng UV-5r

As reported by DARXUS:

Older versions of Chirp (pre v0.4.1-1.0) there is a bug that resulted in me not being able to use my new radio for the week long event I purchased it for.

If you download a chirp file from a Baofeng UV-5R with an older firmware version (such as BFS311), then upload it to a radio with a newer firmware (such as N5R2407) with a version of chirp older than daily build 07172014, it will not recieve audio. Issue #2 here:

http://www.miklor.com/uv5r/UV5R-RecoverN5R.php

If this PPA did not exist, I would have used https://launchpad.net/~dansmith/+archive/ubuntu/chirp-snapshots and not had this problem.

(I used the PPA because the version in precise was too old to upload to a UV-5R, I believe.)