The optimum system would be to have dynamic length zones, but this would need a big change to the way the CPS works, which would be a lot of work.
However a more simple change to the CPS, which I can make fairly easily is to change the CPS Zone structure from 250 Zones each of 16 Channels to 68 Zones each of 80 Channels
The problem with any change like this is backwards compatibility and updating of existing codeplugs.
Radioddity made a similar change to this over a year ago, when they increased the number of Contacts per Rx Group, but reduced the total number of Rx Groups.
Radioddity did not provide a method to update the codeplug, but I was able to do a 1 way upgrade in the CPS if the CPS detected a possible old style codeplug was being loaded.
The firmware would also need to somehow detect that this is a new style codeplug, but I think this may be easier as the beginning of the codeeplug data seems to have the text
Code: Select all
Offset(h) 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F
00000000 4D 44 2D 37 36 30 50 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF MD-760Pÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
e.g. Change the byte after the P to 0x00 to indicate GD-77 codeplug version 0
Of course new format codeplugs would confuse the official firmware but the most likely problem would be that you'd see a load of zones with nonsense names.