I had confirmation from the factory this last week that there still isn’t a definitive release date or pricing set for the TK11(8).
Some information has become available on the internals of the TK11:
Interestingly, there are two transceiver chips on the TK-11; a BK4819 (as used on the UV-K5(8)) and a BK4829. Suggestions are this might provide for true dual VFO operation. The specs for the BK4829 have a top freq of 1160 MHz which suggest the BK4829 chip is active for the UHF.
A quick comparison of the BK4819 and BK4829 chips datasheets shows them to be very similar, with a variation in frequency ranges the most obvious difference:
| BK4819 | 18 – 660 MHz, 840- 1300 MHz |
| BK4829 | 18 – 580 MHz, 760 – 1160 MHz |
There is an RDA5807 chip for the FM broadcast coverage.
It would appear that at least initially, RX on 1296 MHz is not going to be available. 😕
The MCU appears to be a 96MHz Cortex-M3 with a p/n of AP8048A. This chip sports a generous 128k SRAM and can execute code from SPI flash – so hopefully the memory restrictions that have been a limiting factor for the UV-K5 feature expansion, might not be such an issue.
Initially, the factory firmware will prevail, but a QS response has indicated that further down the track, the code may be made available for open source development.
Of course, any or all of the above is subject to confirmation / change !