[caption id="attachment_944" align="alignleft" width="300"] CHIRP[/caption]

In the past I've been frustrated by a lack of Linux-supported software for programming my amateur radios. Sure, the Kenwood software that they gave you to use would kinda work under Wine but it's Wine and who wants to operate under that? Last year I discovered a project that aimed to solve my problem. CHIRP is an open source alternative to other pieces of software that allow you to program your radios. Supporting many of the current radio models, this software allows you to create your channel list and then use that on every radio you own.

Last year when I tried the software it wouldn't program frequencies in the 70-cm band correctly. That bug has been fixed and many features added as well. There are even static lists of frequencies one might want to include on their radio including the FRS channels, 60m channels, NOAA weather radio channels, and others. The software even interfaces with online frequency repositories making it easy to program repeaters into your radio when you are traveling to a new area.

The software is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows and is currently available in the Fedora software repositories (sudo yum install chirp).