CHIRP

Oops, meant to close the other one...whatever.

Oh, now I understand. Redmine automatically closed both of them at the same time because they're linked. Dan, please help.

I have a vx-150, serial cable, and ADMS-1F software I can loan out.

I have a VX-150 I can loan out for testing.

I tried downloading from the radio using the VX-170 driver, and it gets to about 90%, and then throws this error message: " ord() expected a character, but string of length 0 found."

Not sure if that is helpful, but it seems to me that the vx-150 and the vx-170 are similar enough that it wouldn't take much to make it work for the vx-150.

I acquired 2 VX-150s and have access to 2 RTS cables and ADMS software that works with the radios. I've started looking into using Chirp and experienced the same result as Thomas P. I also tried running a port monitor while using Chirp and have a trace up to the point of getting the TypeError msg. Chirp is happily reading data in 32 byte chunks but I can't make heads or tails of the data. I tried added a memory tag to one of the channels, expecting to find the clear text somewhere, but didn't. The trace starts out with 4 chunks of more or less random looking bytes, then 4 blocks of a funky looking count sequence: FF 01 02 ... 0D 0E, repeated. Then comes a large number of chunks with all FFs (empty memory?), then many repetitions of " 06 00 01 00 44 00 00 60 00 0c 00 00 00 aa 00 02". I can try attaching the trace file if that would be useful. In the meantime I'll continue trying to bring up a decent debugging environment.
And, yes, I like these 2 radios. Only 2 meters but they are built like battleships.

A quick update - after almost a month I'm starting to make a bit of progress with a new vx150.py driver. Using win10 and python2 for the development environment. mmap is slowly starting to come into focus and the chirp editor window is gradually getting populated with data. Yay!