- [Instructor] So there's been a few firmware updates
released by Icom for the Icom IC-9700 radio.
So what I thought I'd do in this video is show you
exactly how to update the firmware to the latest
that Icom recommend.
And we'll go through the steps on how to format the SD card
right through to actually loading the firmware on.
(electronic clicks & beeps)
So the first that you'll need is an SD card
such as this one.
Now I've got a micro SD card in here.
If you have a look there
it's a little two gigabyte SanDisk card
which is more than large enough for the firmware
that we're gonna load on here.
The radio will support up to 32 gigabytes,
so you can always get a larger card if you want.
And I've just got it plugged into this SD card adapter.
Now the IC-9700 doesn't come with an SD card,
you do need to provide your own.
So, yeah, basically the SD card slot is just down here
on the bottom left.
So the first we'll do is, with the radio powered off,
just plug in the SD card
and we'll power on now.
We'll go through formatting the SD card first.
Okay now the first thing you wanna do once you've got
the SD card inserted is make sure you see the little SD card
symbol at the top here to make sure that the radio
is reading the card properly.
Now to format the card, which is the first thing that we do,
is hit the Menu button and then we go Set,
SD Card, tap on that.
And then scroll down to, we'll see Format.
Now if we click on Format, it'll say Format OK?
Of course this'll remove
and wipe everything off of the card.
So make sure that if you're using an old card
that you get some photos or whatever else you've got
stored and make sure that you do a backup.
In this case, there's nothing on the card,
so we can format and hit okay,
and it's done relatively quickly.
Now the next thing that we need to do is remove the card
and put into our computer.
Now that involves a couple of things.
We can either scroll down click Unmount
while the radio is turned on.
So we can click Unmount and then Yes,
and then what we can do is we can simply remove the SD card.
The other option is turn the radio off,
remove the SD card, and now that we got the SD card out
we can load the firmware on.
So another thing to mention with the IC-9700 is to just
check what version firmware you're running.
The firmware will show when you start the radio
but if you've already got the radio on
there is another way to find that.
Simply by clicking Menu,
and then going to the Set menu again,
there's this Others option at the bottom.
Just click on Others and then Information
and then Version and this will give the versions
of all the different firmwares in the radio.
So in this case, I think we're running 1.11 firmware.
So the latest firmware at the moment,
at the time of this video, is 1.20.
So we'll go through the process
of loading that onto the radio.
Okay now simply insert the SD card into an SD card reader.
Some computers have an SD card reader already in them.
But in this case, I've got a USB SD card reader.
So just pop that into the computer
and it will pop up with the SD card
and in this case we can see we've got a folder
that's labeled IC-9700.
If we open that up,
there's quite a few different folders there.
So we need to go and find the the firmware.
Now the firmwares that are released for the IC-9700
are on the Icom Japan website
and we can see we've got a list of different radios.
If I scroll to the top here,
we've got the IC-7800, 7700, et cetera.
But if we scroll down we've got the IC-9700.
I'll put a link the description to find the downloads
section of this firmware.
So the latest is version 1.20 that was released on the
11th of October, only a few days ago.
So we click on that
and it gives a quick rundown of the changes in this
version of firmware and also it gives a little bit of,
some information that specifies in the manual exactly what
you can do to update the firmware.
So you can see here that the firmware is gonna update the
main CPU and the other firmwares related to the radio will,
I think, mainly stay unchanged.
So we just scroll down to the bottom and click Agree.
Okay, now that we've downloaded the file,
you'll see that it's saved as a zip format.
Just by double-clicking on that should allow you to
get into the zip file and access the data file
which is the actual firmware.
Now all we need to do is,
we've got the IC-9700 folder down here,
which is sitting on the SD card.
All we need to do is just
drag that straight to the IC-9700 folder.
And that will copy across
and if we open up the 9700 folder we'll see that
that is now sitting underneath all of these other folders.
So that's where the firmware needs to be placed
for the upgrade.
So go ahead and remove the SD card.
It's always best to remove it safely down in the
bottom right-had corner, just click on the little
USB icon which is Safely Remove Hardware
and eject the SD card.
Once it says it can be removed, remove it from the PC.
Okay with the radio powered off, just simply put the SD card
back into the SD card reader in the radio.
Now turn the radio on, wait for it to boot up.
Now that's fired up again, check to make sure you that
you can see the SD card icon up at the top
right hand corner there.
Simply by pressing Menu now,
Set, SD card, and we'll just scroll up in the menus.
We can see Firmware Update.
Click on Firmware Update.
Just gives you a bit of information regarding the upgrade of
the firmware, that if it's risky
and if you haven't got the correct firmware.
So just scroll down,
and asks if you agree to all of the above.
If you agree just hit Yes.
And we can see there's the firmware that we loaded
into our SD card.
So simply just tap on that.
Once again, it gives you another warning
saying don't ever remove the SD card,
don't power off the radio,
make sure that you leave it plugged in.
It'll take about, approximately two minutes.
Now for the second screen, you have to hold
and press Yes for the firmware to update.
Okay, the radio is restarting now.
Once again, if you found this video very helpful
please leave a thumbs-up and comment.
Let me know if you've had any issues
with updating the firmware.
So we'll just go Menu, Set, scroll back down, Others,
Information, Version, and we can see now
we're running version 1.20 on the firmware.
So thanks for watching.
That's how you upgrade the firmware
on the Icom IC-9700.