OpenGD77 mods to make radios more fun

I've been trying to find the best radios to use with my friends and family. I want them to have capable radios without being overwhelmed with the complexity of the interface.

A modern DMR radio shows you a dozen things at once: mode, power, color code, timeslot, filter, squelch. If you already know what those mean, that density is useful. If you got the radio last week, you probably just want to know... which channel am I on.

That's a large part of why I like OpenGD77 to begin with. It replaces the vendor firmware on a whole range of handhelds, so radios from different manufacturers end up running the same menus and the same interface. When a friend calls and asks how to do something, I've got a rough idea of where it lives without having to remember each vendor's particular take on a menu tree.

What I add on top is much narrower. OpenGD77's display is still laid out for operators who already know what they are looking at, so my mods put the channel name front and center and move the rest out of the way.

Everything here is a patch against stock OpenGD77 source, and every mod is a setting you can switch off. Write-ups as I go.

Posts

• The split-name modwritten

  Putting a pipe in a channel name to get two big lines instead of one cramped, moving the transmit timer out of their way.

• A quieter status barsoon

  Replacing mode, power and color code with a signal meter and a battery gauge.

• Building OpenGD77 on a Macsoon

  The toolchain notes I wish I had found first.