Direct ethernet connection for FLEX-6500

Keith - KE4TH

My new FLEX-6500 could not connect with the PC when directly connected with the Ethernet cable. It works fine when connected through a router. This is a very minor issue. Do I need to upgrade the ethernet card in the PC? It is over 5 yrs old. The new radio has extraordinary receive audio. Looking forward to more operating time! Keith KE4TH

Mickey N4MB

>>Do I need to upgrade the ethernet card in the PC? Maybe. The likely reason that this is not working is that your PC NIC might be 100BASET - which is not bi-directional - you have to make/get an Ethernet cross-over cable or get a new Gbit NIC. Gbit arbitrates transmit and receive so that you can directly plug into all devices but 100BaseT doesn't - every interface is set up as a either a switch/hub or a nic. 73, Mickey N4MB

Steve Conklin

The radio needs to obtain an IP address from a DHCP server. This is built into all home routers. With a direct cable between the PC and radio, the radio can't obtain an IP network address and network services can't be started.

Steve-N5AC

The radio has Link Local support (RFC 3927) as well as automatic cable flip (MDI-X) in the Ethernet PHY. Theoretically, there should be no issue on 100BaseT based on the data sheet, but most of the testing we have done is on Gigabit cables. The Ethernet PHY we use is fairly sophisticated and has a bunch of on-board diagnostics to figure your cable out and adjust to make it work. See tables below:

W5XZ - dan

wow, now THAT'S impressive !!! this IS quite a 'beast' we have !!!

Keith - KE4TH

Update - I tried a new PCI network card with the MDI-x feature. No luck, still unable to connect directly. I also updated the drivers for the existing card. I also tried a crossover cable, and still no luck. Running Windows XP SP3. Limited connectivity error message is always unable to acquire network address. So using a router as a switch for now. I can connect directly with my two year old Windows 7 laptop, so the issue is not on the radio side. An IT person at works thinks this is an XP issue. Any thoughts are welcome! Thanks!

Tim - W4TME

Keith - open up a HelpDesk ticket so we can do sone one on one troubleshooting.

Steve-N5AC

You can disable APIPA (Local Link) on Windows XP in the registry. You might look to see if this has been done on your machine. Here's a reference: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/disable-apipa-on-windows-xp-to-speed-up-troubleshooting/ You want to do the OPPOSITE of this article, of course. Steve

Keith - KE4TH

Steve, I did the registry edit and set the value to 1 to ensure the local linking feature is active. This did not help. I'll try some internet research this weekend to see if I can find a similar issue. Thank for your suggestions.

Steve-N5AC

OK I figured that was a long shot. I would do some more searching for "APIPA Disabled Windows XP" and see if you can find any other experiments that might help figure out what's wrong.

Tim - W4TME

Keith - I have converted your issue into a HelpDesk ticket so we can do some in depth one-on-one troubleshooting.

Michael - N5TGL

Not sure if you have your network card set to a static IP, but that prevented my upgrade until I switched it back to dynamic.

Bill-W9OL

Does it make any difference whether it's connected to the computer or the router. I just naturally assumed the router was the preferred as I get the downloads and this help forum. But if you guys think it's better to connect to the rig, I can do dat! Actualy no I can't my computer only has one cat port and that one's taken. It's connected to the router. So I guess the 6.5K MUST be connected to the router.

Robert -- N5IKD

If your computer has a static IP address, then you should be able to use a DHCP server to assign an IP address to the radio. http://sourceforge.net/projects/dhcpserver/ A handy feature here would be the ability to view and change the IP address settings through the front panel display and buttons.

Tim - W4TME

This topic has been solved in Zendesk

Tim - W4TME

This topic has been solved in Zendesk