CHIRP is a free, open-source tool for programming your amateur radio. It supports a large number of manufacturers and models, as well as provides a way to interface with multiple data sources and formats. The homepage is at https://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Home

It is popular for programming the numerous ‘Chinese’ radios such Baofengs, using it on a Raspberry Pi has one main advantage in that the dubious programming leads tend to work with no issue on the Pi (and other linux machines) unlike on Windows PCs where their are often driver issues caused by manufacturers trying to disable ‘clone’ chipsets.

Information on how to use it can be found on the Chirp website.

An old version of the software can be found in the Raspbian repository under the Add/Remove Software. Alternatively the latest version can be installed from the Chirp website.

To make things easier I have taken the instructions and written a simple script file to automatically download, install the program and create a menu shortcut.

The script contains the following commands and downloads the latest version as of 2-March-2018

sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y install python-gtk2 python-serial python-libxml2
wget --no-check-certificate https://trac.chirp.danplanet.com/chirp_daily/LATEST/chirp-daily-20180210.tar.gz
tar xzf chirp-daily-20180210.tar.gz
cd chirp-daily-20180210
sudo python setup.py install
cd ~

Firstly open a terminal window by clicking the menu icon as shown

This will open a window

In this window type

wget https://skars.co.uk/files/chirp-setup.sh

and press enter, it should download the script file as below

now in the same window type

chmod +x chirp-setup.sh

and press enter, this makes the script executable (can be seen in above graphic)

now the final step type

./chirp-setup.sh

and press enter, it will now download the software and then install the program into the menu under accessories

For information on using the program please refer to the Chirp documentation website

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