I've mentioned this before in a kind of hit and miss manner. While I have three perfectly good ICOM radios, I have a house full of Chinese radios. They work, they're cheap, and Programming them is easy with CHIRP. I have come to believe the name CHIRP is an acronym for CHInese Radio Program. Its pretty hard to screw up a radio using CHIRP but there is one way you can definitely ruin one. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER just load somebody elses file directly into your radio. If their Firmware and your Fimware version are identical, it will work but if the firmware versions are different in any way, your radio will go nuts and will not work anymore. Then, If you are lucky you can go into the CHIRP website and get the Factory Image Files and recover your Firmware, maybe. I had to do it on one of my UV5R's and its a pain in the ass but it did recover the radio. On any radio that you are programming with CHIRP, you must Download whatever is in the radio from the factory to your computer. You have to tell the program(Choose from their list) what Brand and Model radio you have. It'll take about a full minute to load from the radio to the computer. Then you can load and open somebody else's Chirp File and Copy and paste the entire page into your Downloaded file. At that point, you probably should close the other person's file so that the only file on the computer screen is your file. At any point after this, you can give your file a name and save it to your computer. Don't close your file yet. At this point you have inserted all the Frequencies, PL Tones, Power levels, Turn on or off the ability to transmit cetain frequencies, Scan or Skip certain frequencies, and Repeater offset frequencies. Now you need to left click just below where it says MEMORIES to where it says SETTINGS. Those settings can be confusing so only change things that you know what they do. Once you have evrything in the settings set up the way you want them, then save the file again and you will have all the memories and all the settings saved. Now, if you've done all of that, you now have a file that you can bring up and COPY and PASTE to another radio. Here's the rub...... Copying and pasting does not also insert the Settings. Yep, you have to go into SETTINGS on every radio that you program and set every one of those settings for each radio. I've programmed at least 30 radios with CHIRP and will be glad to answer any questions that you might have. Once you have everything in the file that you want in your radio, then you have to click on UPLOAD to Radio.
