CHIRP is a free, open-source tool for programming frequencies and settings into your amateur radio. It supports a large number of make and models.

It is really easy to use and makes it extremely simple to copy frequencies between different radios (of different makes). Not all radios are supported by CHIRP however, so it’s a good idea to make sure CHIRP can program a specific radio before buying it.

Baofeng radios can be a bit tricky to program with CHRIP the first time around because of the Windows Driver. If you’re trying to use CHIRP on Windows with a Baofeng radio, see this page first.

Now that the appropriate drivers are installed:

1. Connect your radio to your computer and open CHIRP.
2. Under Radio, select Download From Radio:
3. Select the right Port (which is probably wrong by default), Vendor and Model and press ok. It’s good to download what’s already on your radio even if you don’t have anything because in addition to frequencies, it also downloads settings specific to your radio.
4. Before you go and program frequencies, have a look at the Settings to see if you can configure anything there. See below for screenshots of VA7FI’s Baofeng settings:
5. To enter frequencies, you can either type them manually, or copy and paste from another CHIRP file. Never upload someone else’s CHIRP file directly though because the radios might have different firmware that can cause issues. It’s pretty easy to open a second CHIRP file in a second tab, and copy and paste the frequencies you want into your tab. See VA7FI’s CHIRP files for example.

I just finished updating my laptop to the latest Linux Mint 20 (based on Ubuntu 20.04) and once I tried re-installing Chirp, I got this error message:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 chirp-daily : Depends: python-libxslt1 which is a virtual package and is not provided by any available package

               Depends: python-gtk2 which is a virtual package and is not provided by any available package

               Depends: python-serial which is a virtual package and is not provided by any available package

               Depends: python-suds which is a virtual package and is not provided by any available package

A little Googling led me to this work around, which is basically to:

1. point the repository to xenial instead of focal
2. install the dependencies manually
3. try the install again.

It seemed to have worked, although I’m not too happy about having installed dependencies manually. I uploaded the dependencies on Sync (SCARCS/Software/chirp-dep-20.04.zip) in case the original link stops working.