[Patriot Blast Ssd Firmware Update Zip
Christel Malden
This past May during a trip to the Mecca of Amateur Radio in Dayton Ohio, I ordered a Ten-Tec 507 Patriot QRP rig at the 2015 Dayton Hamvention. I have been having a blast playing about with this small yet robust little rig!
The main source for alternate forms of firmware worked on by the community is the Patriot Yahoo! group at This is a closed community group and you must register to join. I generally do not care for Yahoo groups, however the people on this group seem cooperative and always ready to help. A few months after I joined I decided to start my own group on Reddit. This way nobody had to register or sign in to gain access to the information and files created. My Reddit site is more of a brain dump style site so that anyone with information can post there. My Reddit site for the Patriot is at
The latest code to be floating about the Internet for the Patriot is the Patriot Alliance Modification ver 1.2 written by PA3ANG and modified by various other hams, or PAM 1.2 for short. PAM 1.2 introduces a great deal of features that were not available with the Ten-Tec stock firmware. The code is based on the original Ten-Tec factory code but also ads the following features:
DDS offset compensation (parameter).
Faster display routines (no updates when no changes).
Improved display layout and added S-meter and CW speed.
Easy selection of starting band and default frequencies.
After I loaded this code, I absolutely loved the features that were added. I ordered a 12832 pix OLED display from Adafruit to use as the display on this rig. After a bit of tinkering about and picking the brain of fellow ham and good friend Mike, AC9ID we together got the display working, and it looks great! It can be seen well even in bright sunlight without being washed out and has quite a bit of information on the display.
I loved the feature of holding in the FUNCTION key to transmit a tone carrier for tuning. The Iambic keyer setting is nice so that you can use a paddle for CW or a straight key. It will detect the type based on the how many conductors the 3.5mm plug has that is inserted into the keyer jack.
The receiver: I have found this small radio to be actually quite a good performer as far as QRP rigs go. The receiver performance seems to be fairly sensitive however there is a potential for overload of strong signals. I would suspect changes to the AGC circuit would help with the strong signal overloading. I found the bandwidth filters sufficient to reject adjacent channel interference to some degree, however they are fairly basic DSP filters and cannot perform miracles. The RIT control is very nice to tweak stations that are slightly off frequency and is intuitive to use. Although it is NOT the receiver in a KX3, it does perform surprisingly well overall with only the strong signal overload to be of minor issue.
The Transmitter: Feeding this rig with 13.8 V with a power supply able to provide at least 5 Amps I have found that I can get just over 5 watts out of the transmitter into a dummy load on both 40m and 20m. The mic gain control was really pretty weak set from the factory, so I had to turn up the mic gain (MIC LEVEL IN) pot a bit in order to get adequate modulation to drive the transmitter. I am running the mic gain almost fully open, but I had a friend listen to me on another radio and the audio sounded good, not distorted using a Yaesu style 8-pin hand microphone. I may need to turn this down when using a headset such as my Heil Pro7 or other microphone or headset.
Do you own a Patriot, Rebel or other QRP rig? Let me know about your setup in the comments below! Also if you are a Rebel or Patriot owner or want to chat with others that have these rigs, please visit the Ten-Tec 506/507 Reddit subreddit at
My wife has a Patriot and is just getting started. She has extensive programming experience (programmed much of the electronic power steering in automobiles) but relatively no hardware experience. The Patriot was purchased as an experimental platform. I think once she gets going, she can provide lots of different features. I know at this point, she wants to use a Fourier series filter. Thanks for your site. It has been helpful already!
Great to hear that your wife is interested in the Patriot! It has been fun for me to use as a small QRP radio. We could always use more development and tinkering in the group. For resources on the Patriot, check out the Yahoo! group for the Patriot, and also my Reddit group at With RKR selling Ten-Tec to Dishtronix, they are in a bit of trouble. It will be interesting to see what Dishtronix does with the TT kits, and the open source rigs (the Rebel and the Patriot). Hopefully they will continue making them, they are pricey but a nice little rig none the less, and the hack-able aspect keeps tinkers like myself coming back for more.
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