Stop Programming Radios the Hard Way — Try This Instead

Added: 2026-05-03

[00:00:00]It is a very interesting world that we live in today. Stick around and we'll get right to it. Hey, welcome back guys.

[00:00:06]Jason km4ack.

[00:00:08]Today I wanted to take just a few minutes and look at how we can use AI with ham radio and it was actually kind of fascinating even for me. Now I'm not going to get into the upside or the downsides to AI. I understand it's kind of a very hot topic right now and you're either really enjoying it or you're really against it. But regardless of whether you like it or whether you don't, I think it's here to stay. Now, what can we do with it with ham radio?

[00:00:41]Well, let's jump over to the computer and I'll show you a couple of different interesting use cases that I've got that are very basic and barely scratching the surface. We're not going to be programming any kind of code today, but we are going to be programming your radio. Let's check this out. All right, so for this first use case, and this is the less interesting of the two, I've got an ICS 205 form here that's filled out for an upcoming event that our club is going to work. So what we're going to do here is we're going to take and just I'm in chat GPT and I'm just going to click right here on the plus sign and say add photos and files. We're going to go find that ICS form and go ahead and add that to our chat. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to tell chat GPT exactly what I need. So we've got very basic instructions here. I just said take a look at the attached PDF and create a CSV file that I can import into chirp and program my ham radio. Let's go ahead and send that to chat GPT and see what kind of results we get. So you'll see that it's reading the document, it's analyzing, and hopefully it's going to come up with that CSV file that we need.

[00:01:57]Now it may take it a second here, sometimes it will analyze and give us the results faster than others. But let's see what it's come up with. All right, so right away you can see that we can just click here to download the chirp CSV file.

[00:02:12]But let's go ahead and read through some of this others and it talks about setting the simplex channels with no offset and then it calculated our standard offset for our repeaters. It did use tone mode where tones were provided, left tone blank where listed as none and set all modes to FM analog based on the ICS form. So it even took into account that we weren't using something like DMR or system fusion and noted that. Now I see here that Short Mountain Repeater didn't list a tone if it actually uses one, you'll want to add it before uploading. So I need to double check that because I thought that the Short Mountain Repeater actually used a tone, but that's something that I can double check.

[00:02:59]And then it's got some other notes here.

[00:03:01]So let's go ahead and download this and attempt to import this into chirp. So I'm just going to click the download file there. You'll see that it gives us a chirp import.csv that we've downloaded. So let's go ahead and open chirp and attempt to import that channel list. All right, so with chirp open, let's go ahead and click file. We'll go to the open. Let's navigate back to our downloads directory and there we go, chirp import.csv.

[00:03:30]Let's see what happens when we try this.

[00:03:33]And it looks like we got a an error here of R tone 0.0 is not valid for the tone and that looks like that is online six. So we'll take a look at that in just a second. Let's see what happens when we click okay here and yep, it looks like it left out that Short Mountain Repeater and that's probably because it listed that tone as 0.0.

[00:03:59]All right, so I've opened the CSV file because I wanted to see this little closer. You can see it's not perfect, but we're close, I do believe. Now I did verify that the tone for Short Mountain is supposed to be 114.8 and I guess that was left off of the PDF file, but I see right here that it's 00.

[00:04:18]So we're just going to copy this and let's paste it into yep, I want to do that and let's paste that into this field as well. And yes, I want to do that and then I'm going to save this and we'll save that again as the CSV file. Let's close this and let's try re-importing it and see if we still come up with that same error. So we'll go back to file and open and chirp import. No errors that time and you can see that it definitely did grab this Oh, I see I left out tone right here. So I would need to click in here and put um that it was a tone. So I could do that and then this would be ready to upload to whichever radio you needed for the event. Now let's take a look at another use case.

[00:05:08]All right, so I've created a brand new chat here and we all know that Hamcation is coming up in just a couple of weeks from the time I'm recording this video.

[00:05:18]And what I want to do is I want to see if chat GPT can plan a route and give me the repeaters along that route. So this time instead of typing it out, I'm going to try talking to chat GPT and let's just see what happens. So we'll click the dictate button right here and let's see if I can get this on the first attempt. It's asking if I want to allow it to connect to my microphone and I'm going to say yes, please do. I am a ham radio operator that is getting ready and planning a road trip.

[00:05:50]I will be traveling from Murfreesboro, Tennessee to Dayton, Ohio for the Dayton Hamvention Hamfest.

[00:06:00]Please create a travel route for me and include the most popular 2 meter repeaters along that route. Give me the list in a CSV file format that I can import into chirp and be sure that you sort those repeaters in order as I am traveling.

[00:06:23]All right, so you'll see that I just clicked the check mark right there and it pulled all of that information into this so I didn't have to sit there and type all of that out. Let's go ahead and send that prompt and let's see what it comes up with. All right, so it's still thinking and generating this, but let's go ahead and start looking through it.

[00:06:42]It is looking at the route overview, which is pretty much exactly the route I will take between Murfreesboro and Dayton. Let's take a look at some of this. It's also focused on known active club repeaters, wide area coverage machines once that are near interstate corridors. And this is kind of cool, it verified the listing especially for the Dayton area.

[00:07:08]And it has provided this format right here. Now I'm kind of curious if it included the talk-in frequency. Let's see, prac- practical travel tips here.

[00:07:21]Always include 52 simplex, so did it do that?

[00:07:26]Yep, it's got 52 simplex right there.

[00:07:29]Okay, pretty interesting, pretty interesting.

[00:07:33]So let's see, did it include the talk-in? Oh, around Dayton repeaters are most reliable. So it may have included the talk-in. I'll need to actually go to the Hamvention website and double check that.

[00:07:48]And then it's even asking me if I want it could also create a list and add in 70 cm repeaters or it could include DMR, fusion, and Allstar repeaters in that list. But it asked me right here, um I can >> [clears throat] >> to generate a ready-to-import chirp file, IMG or expanded CSV with memory banks and tones. It just needs to know my specific radio model. Now I'm probably not going to do that because I might want to put this on a couple of different radios. So having a CSV file to me is a little bit better. So I'll just ask it for that file. So say, give me a CSV file that I can download. And let's see if it can generate that for me. All right, it took it a couple of seconds, but you'll see right here that I've got a link for the download. Now it'll probably name it the exact same thing.

[00:08:48]Oh, it didn't. It even gave it a unique name, Hamvention trip repeaters.csv.

[00:08:54]So again, you might run into a few little gotchas when you're trying to import that into chirp, but the fact that you can get that far along in the process is pretty amazing to me that you can just prompt a computer and it spits out that information. Now I want to double check some of that. I'm going to look up some of those repeaters in Repeater Book and I'm going to test this on my way to Dayton this year. So I'll probably do a follow-up in the newsletter. If you're not subscribed to the newsletter, there's a link down in the description below. But I hope this gives you just a couple of very, very minute examples of how you can use AI to enhance your ham radio experience. If you guys are already using it, tell me down in the comments below exactly what you're using AI for in ham radio. If you found today's information helpful, be sure to give us a thumbs up before you head off. We will see you guys on the next one. Until then, 73.