unknownprc: TEF6686 Silver Metal Case - Details and Firmware variants

This TEF6686 Silver Metal Case radio is sold as being a 2nd generation full band radio by some Chinese shops, and ships with a proprietary firmware V1.18.

It is characterized as having three colored buttons without labels at the front (Red, Yellow, Blue) and two rotary knobs at the right side (Encoder at the top and volume potentiometer at bottom).

Other variants have three rotary knobs at the right side, where the middle one is for Squelch control that several users find useless in this type of radio.

The functions assigned to the colored buttons varies depending on the firmware distribution. Hence these radios dont have labels on them.

This particular model variant was shipped with a proprietary firmware V1.18 (as of aug-2024). During boot, the radio will show this screen for a moment:

 

As these chassis series runs the original PE5PVB/TEF6686_ESP32 Open Source firmware created by  Sjef Verhoeven, I have done what many others have done and installed the latest available version 2.11 from the GitHub repository to benefit from continuous bug fix and improvements. Boot info:

 

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