TYT
| TYT | |
|---|---|
| Company name | TYT Electronics Co., Ltd. |
| Also known as | Tytera |
| Type | Private company |
| Headquarters | Nan'an, Quanzhou, Fujian, China |
| Known for | MD-380 DMR handheld; TH-9800 quad-band FM mobile |
| Status | Active |
| Website | tyt888.com |
TYT, also known by the older name Tytera, is a Chinese manufacturer of two-way radios based in Nan'an, part of the city of Quanzhou in Fujian province. Its full name is TYT Electronics Co., Ltd. Among hams it is known for inexpensive DMR handhelds, especially the MD-380, and for analog FM radios such as the TH-9800 quad-band mobile. The MD-380 also became the subject of a community project that patched and extended its firmware.
History
Sources differ on when TYT was founded. A trade directory listing gives both 1998 and 2002 as its founding year, the same listing shows the present company incorporated in 2008, and a company press release says it was established in 2008. The company is a privately held limited company with a single owner. It describes itself as having in-house design and production of radio cases, antennas and keypads, and it offers OEM and ODM manufacturing, meaning it builds radios that other companies sell under their own names.
TYT's catalog covers analog and DMR handhelds, mobile radios, repeaters and push-to-talk-over-cellular (PoC) radios for business and amateur users, and it exports to Asia, Europe and the Americas. Quanzhou is home to several other two-way radio makers, among them Baofeng, AnyTone and Wouxun.
Amateur radio products
- MD-380 – An inexpensive single-band DMR and FM handheld. It has also been sold under other brands, such as the Retevis RT3, and the related MD-390 shares the same basic design and firmware.
- MD-UV380 series – Dual-band 2-meter and 70-centimeter DMR and FM handhelds.
- TH-9800 – An FM mobile radio covering the 10-meter, 6-meter, 2-meter and 70-centimeter bands at up to 50 watts, with a remote-mountable front panel and a cross-band repeat mode, which retransmits signals received on one band out on another.
The MD-380 firmware project
In 2016 Travis Goodspeed, KK4VCZ, and Christiane Ruetten presented their reverse engineering of the MD-380 at the TROOPERS security conference in Germany. They found a way to read and modify the radio's protected firmware and released md380tools, a free collection of programs that downloads TYT's official firmware, applies patches and loads the result into the radio without any hardware changes.
The patched firmware added features the factory version lacked, among them a promiscuous mode that lets the radio play DMR transmissions on its channel regardless of which talkgroup they are addressed to. The project supports the single-band MD-380 and MD-390 and rebadged equivalents such as the Retevis RT3 and RT8, but not the dual-band MD-UV380 series.