I bought a Baofeng 5RH-Pro radio which claims GPS and APRS broadcasting features built in so that I could test my other radio and computer APRS setup inexpensively.

Unfortunately, it arrived with firmware 2.0.2, but to get (somewhat) working APRS beaconing you need to upgrade it to firmware 2.0.9.   Getting software for the Baofeng radios is a fraught experiance. There isn’t a “main website” to download it from, you are supposed to go through individual dealers, and the amazon seller provides a personal username / password to download software from a 3rd party website that isn’t sketchy at all…

Plus, I’m not even 100% sure that the CPS programming software (which typically is used to set up the saved channels and settings without having to type everything into the radio directly) can also upgrade the firmware. [Plus, at least one vendor on VirusTotal flagged it as having malware.]

[I really anti-recommend the 5RH-Pro as the out of the box experiance is abismal, unless you need a very inexpensive radio that (with a lot of work) can be made to beacon APRS packets with positions from the built in GPS reeiver.  Buy the K6 instead if you don’t need GPS/APRS, as you can program it using CHIRP on linux without jumping through any hoops and the default firmware on it worked great for me..]

Anyways, before putting in the effort of setting up a virtual box with a windows install just to run this questionable CPS software, which may or may not actually upgrade the firmware, I asked the Baofeng User Group (on Facebook) and eventually found a file  (5RH_engtool_fw_v2.7z) uploaded by “Larry Ficken” which worked for me.

This 7zip archive  contains a “radio.exe” (which does NOT flag in Virus Total, so that’s one point less of sketchyness when compared to the vendor suggested files…although you are still running an exe you downloaded from a random dude on FB, so there is that….)  and a firmware file “BF_5RH_501_v2_0_9.dat” which successfully upgraded my radio to 2.0.9 where the APRS positioning beacon system (mostly) works.

Now, it’s still a windows EXE file, but I was able to run it successfully under Ubuntu Linux 24.04 using WINE and MONO.  To do this I had to:

Linux: Installed wine & mono
Download wine-mono.msi from the official WineHQ site (matching the version of Mono I had on my Linux setup)
run ‘wine uninstaller’ from the command line (choose/install the wine-mono.msi file)

Check that my /dev/ttyUSB0 (USB serial port for my K1 programming cable) was linked to COM4 in ~/.wine/dosdevices

Run ‘wine regedit” at the command line and confirm that COM4 was set up correctly in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wine\Port

(On mine, it was listed as “COM4:” so I removed the “:” from the end and that made things work.)

Finally, I was able to type “wine radio.exe” at the command line and the very simplistic firmware updater tool loaded and successfully ran:

This successfully upgraded my radio’s firmware.  [It may also be possible to use wine to run the CPS programming software under Linux….but I haven’t tried that, because CHIRP works great with my K6 radio, and I really recommend you buy radios that CHIRP supports, especially if you are running Linux as your main OS.]