Last week I took advantage of the New Ham Jumpstart Program offered by QRZ.com and Gigaparts. As I only have a pair of Baofeng UV-21Rs, I thought it would be good to have another inexpensive, but higher quality, radio to compare and constrast with. The Explorer QRZ-1 arrived last Friday.

I won’t go into a long review, but rather mention a quirk/bug I encountered with using CHIRP to program it instead of the provided “QRZ-1 Programmer” software by rtsystems.com. I have a local repeater all programmed in, but even though the receive CTCSS tone was correct, it wouldn’t break squelch until I performed a Tone Scan. If I powered off and back on, I had to re-do the scan in order for traffic to break squelch.

After an evening discussing the issue with others on the local weekly net, I did some poking around and discovered that if I used the QRZ-1 Programmer software to download, and re-upload, the programming (without changing anything), the radio worked as expected. The tone configuration and everything looked correct after downloading, so I don’t know what was going wrong – other than the CHIRP driver is clearly marked/warned as being experimental.

I need to do some more troubleshooting to see if I can get even more specific repro steps before I file an issue. When I did the original upload from CHIRP, I copied the memory entries from my Baofeng image rather than re-enter everything by hand. I’m wondering now if that was the ultimate issue.

Anyway, I hope this information can help anyone else out there starting out with this device.

73.