Web AT Options

What this tool is for

Alongside the codeplug you spend your evenings editing, your radio keeps a small set of factory settings of its own: which frequencies it will receive and transmit on, what language its menus are in, two passwords, and the dealer and service details a shop fills in when it sells the radio. None of that lives in a codeplug, which is why nothing you do in a project ever changes it. Web AT Options is how you reach it — it reads those settings off the radio over USB, shows them to you, and writes back the ones you changed.

Most people arrive here for one of three reasons:

• the radio transmits on the wrong bands, or flatly refuses to transmit on a band it should — that is Frequency Range, and it is the section below;
• the menus are in a language nobody in the shack reads;
• there is a program password on the radio and nobody remembers setting it.

It works with the AT-D878UV and AT-D878UVII, every AT-D578 (the AT-D578UV(III) Plus on firmware 2.xx and the AT-D578UV(III) G/Pro on 1.xx), the AT-D168UV and the AT-D890UV. Rebadged radios — the BTECH DMR-6X2, DMR-6X2 Pro, DA-7X2 and their relatives — are not supported, and are turned away when you connect. Any signed-in account can use it, free plans included, and it costs nothing from your daily allowance; reads and writes are recorded against your account. If you are not sure your browser can talk to a radio at all, About AesApp WebCPS has the list.

Because these settings sit outside the codeplug, the safety nets you are used to do not reach them. They appear in no .rdt file and no CSV. A codeplug write cannot repair them. Even a full radio backup will not put them back — Restore from backup deliberately leaves them alone.

Frequency Range: where your radio is allowed to transmit

This is the one to slow down for. Frequency Range is what the radio itself consults when it decides which frequencies it will listen on and which it will key up on. Get it wrong and nothing breaks, exactly — a band simply goes quiet. Channels there stop appearing, or the PTT does nothing, and no amount of rebuilding the codeplug will bring them back, because the codeplug was never the problem.

The list offers the plans your model was built with, and it is worth reading what each one costs you. Mode 17 · Rx:430-440 136-174 Tx:136-174 hears UHF but transmits only VHF, so choosing it takes UHF transmit away entirely. A narrow plan such as Mode 4 · Rx:434-438 144-146 Tx:434-438 144-146 leaves every channel outside those two windows unusable.

If your radio already holds a plan that is not in the list — a factory special, or a quirk of its firmware — the tool shows it rather than hiding it, labels it as one your model's table does not name, and lets you keep it. Keeping it is all you can do with it, so think twice before moving off it: once you write a different plan, the original is no longer on offer.

Your radio's plan and your codeplug's plan are separate

This trips up almost everyone once. A codeplug carries a band plan of its own, in its own file, and moving one never moves the other. When the two disagree, the factory Windows CPS refuses to write and says only Band Error!, which tells you nothing about which end is wrong. RDT Band Plan Updater takes that whole question apart, including how to decide which end to move.

Two controls can set the plan on the radio, and they are not interchangeable. Change Radio Bandplan on a project's Settings tab offers amateur plans only, and on one password-protected plan it will warn you that the radio intends to throw your change away. This tool offers your model's full list, and it also puts right the password state behind that warning — which is the real reason to come here rather than stay there.

Using it

The whole session is five steps, and the middle one is the only one that changes anything.

1. Put the radio in PC mode and press Connect, then Read Option. Everything on screen from that point is what your radio actually holds, not a guess.
2. Change what you came for, press Write to Radio, and confirm.
3. The radio does not apply anything until the tool leaves PC mode. Disconnect does exactly that, so treat it as "finish", never as "cancel".
4. The tool reads the settings back and reports Verified: the block was read back after the write. That line is your proof. If it does not appear, reconnect and press Read Option to see where things stand.
5. A successful write ends the session — the fields grey out and Write to Radio stops responding. That is the tool finishing, not failing. For another edit, press Connect and Read Option again.

Two things catch people out. Changing Language makes the radio reboot on its own, and it resets the radio's menu settings to defaults once while it is at it — your channels and zones come through untouched, but a menu you had tuned to taste will not. And pressing Write to Radio on a form you have not edited is not always the no-op it looks like: only a radio whose maintenance password is already the factory one can answer Nothing to write — every field already matches the radio.

If a write stops part-way, the radio is left sitting in PC mode, which is not a state it is meant to idle in. Power-cycle it, or connect again and let the tool leave PC mode properly, then press Read Option to see what actually made it across.

What you cannot change here

Five fields carry a padlock. Four of them are the radio's identity — Model, Serial No., Production Date and Manufacture Code. They are read-only by policy, and no edit to them will be accepted.

The fifth is Maint. Enable PW, and it is worse than read-only: every write resets it to your model's factory value, whether or not you touched anything else. There is a reason. One band plan only stays set while that password is the factory one, and a radio that quietly reverts your band plan at the next power-up is a miserable thing to debug. Resetting the password is how the tool makes sure a plan you write here is a plan the radio keeps.

The other fields

Language and Secondary Language decide what the radio puts on its display. Secondary Language is a slot number rather than a named language, and which language lives in that slot depends on the firmware your particular radio is running — so the honest answer is to try it and look.

Area Code, Maintenance Date, Dealer Code, Stock Date, Sell Date, Seller and Maintenance Desc. are record-keeping: free text a dealer fills in, and yours to use or ignore as you like. Program PW is stored the same way. AesApp WebCPS never asks for it and never checks it, so clearing it here is simply how a forgotten program password goes away.

Two habits will save you a puzzled moment. Emptying a text field is a real edit, not a no-op. And these fields take printable ASCII only — so if the tool shows a · where you expected a character, the radio is holding something there it cannot print for you. Leave that field alone and nothing happens; edit it with the dot still in place and the write is refused with printable ASCII only. Fields you never touch are never checked.

Band Select, AES Enable, AES Show Keys in CPS and Full Test Mode are stored and read back faithfully.

When it refuses to edit your radio

Two checks run before the tool will change a byte, and both of them tell you in plain words rather than leaving you to guess from symptoms. First, the radio has to say it is one of the four models the tool supports; if it calls itself something else, the message quotes the name it gave and stops there. Second, the model recorded in the radio's own settings has to agree with the one it just claimed to be.

That second check is a seatbelt, not an obstacle. A radio whose stored settings disagree with the model it reports would have those settings read and rewritten in the wrong places, and you would not find out until the next time you keyed up. A rebadged radio usually connects, gets as far as Read Option, and stops there — disappointing if it is the radio in your hand, and exactly what should happen.