S: Re: Elecraft Utilities

[Ken G Kopp]

Well said, Kevin!

This was my initial intent when I started this thread,
but you've done a better job of stating the obvious.

73!

Ken Kopp - K0PP


On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 12:32 PM, Kevin Stover <[hidden email]>
wrote:

> And who gets to fix the radio, under warrantee of course, when this home
> brewed command

line utility bricks the radio? Through this whole discussion I've heard
> very little from proponents

   of open sourcing the utilities on this minor little point. Telling isn't
it.

This could be a profit center for Elecraft now that I think about it. If it
were me, I'd charge $1,500
to fix any Elecraft product which has had it's brains blown out by some
home brewed and unsupported
flash utility.





On 4/9/2016 1:13 PM, ei6iz.Brendan Minish wrote:

> I think that all most of us would need would be a command line utility that
>> can be used to update firmware and perhaps back up settings.
>> Either making this open source or just releasing the protocol spec would
>> be
>> all that's needed.
>> This would not require the firmware to be open sourced, it would just mean
>> that the Elecraft provided firmwares can be uploaded  to the radio.
>>
>> Icing on the cake would be the ability to make radio backups
>>
>>
> --
> R. Kevin Stover
> AC0H
> ARRL
> FISTS #11993
> SKCC #215
> NAQCC #3441
>
>
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[Kevin Stover]

My perspective comes from the early days of home brewing PC's.
In the "good old days" with soldered BIOS EEPROMS and manufacturer
approved command line flash utilities it was entirely possible to trash
a motherboard. Lose power during a BIOS update or a cosmic ray takes out
a section of the chip (I'm only partially kidding) and you got to buy a
new motherboard. Your chances were 60/40 at best, a little better than
flipping a coin. Next came socketed BIOS where all you had to do after a
failed flash was buy a new chip from AMI, Award or Phoenix.

These days with dual BIOS chips on board, BIOS backed up to hard drive
and GUI flash utilities it's a lot easier to recover from a failed flash
and not nearly as expensive, but failures still happen. That's with mobo
manufacturer approved and supplied utilities. How many posts do we get
here a month from folks who have to do an EEINIT or at the very least
re-flash after a failure?

If I was Elecraft I would run away from this potential Pandora's Box
rapidly.


On 4/9/2016 1:43 PM, Ken G Kopp wrote:
> Well said, Kevin!
>
> This was my initial intent when I started this thread,
> but you've done a better job of stating the obvious.
>
> 73!
>
> Ken Kopp - K0PP
>


--
R. Kevin Stover
AC0H
ARRL
FISTS #11993
SKCC #215
NAQCC #3441


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