Ham radios are a fun way of learning how the radio spectrum works, and more importantly: they’re embedded devices that may run weird chips/firmware! @landaire got curious how easy it’d be to hack a Yaesu FT-70D. The only existing resource found for Yaesu radios was someone who posted about custom firmware for their Yaesu FT1DR.
The Reddit poster mentioned that if you go through the firmware update process via USB, the radio exposes its Renesas H8SX microcontroller and can have its flash modified using the Renesas SDK. This was a great start and looked promising, but the SDK wasn’t trivial to configure and I wasn’t sure if it could even dump the firmware… so I didn’t use it for very long.
You can check out the detailed methodology in the post here.
We look to feature Ham radio content on Sundays!
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