It has been widely confirmed that the Alinco DJ-MD5TGP, BTECH 6X2 and Anytone AT-D878 are essentially the same reference design and only have a few differences in hardware or software.
As discovered by Jason Reilly and his excellent page regarding the Anytone 868 and 878, it is possible for the user to change the vocoder. This is done via software and is detailed here.
Alinco DJ-MD5TGP Baseband
HVDN was the first to point out that it was possible to expand the frequency range of the Alinco MD-MD5TGP. The procedure for that was not far different than that of the Anytone, so upgrading the vocoder followed the same procedure with just a few differences. Proceed at your own risk in doing this upgrade.
In our "Teardown: Expanded Alinco DJ-MD5TGP Review" article in November 2018, we pointed out the SICOMM SCT3258 chip and this is where the magic vocoder resides.
Go ahead and download this file from Jason's Tiny Upload link for the Anytone 878. You can follow his instructions closely, but for the Alinco DJ-MD5TGP you will need to:
- Hold down # and PTT while turning the radio on to enter boot mode for SCT
- In the SICOMM software, you need to set the speed to 115200, not 9600 baud.
The Alinco DJ-MD5TGP used for this test already had version V2.01.05NJ. It was simple to upgrade to V2.01.07BA. The receive audio seems to be even more pleasant now on DMR and preliminary audio reports seem positive, but more testing needs to be done.
Thank you Jason for all your great documentation!
More about the Alinco MD-5TGP via HVDN:
How to setup the APRS? My CP software v1.10 does not have the feature. So, how to do?
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