Flex 6500 upgrade from 1.3 to 1.3.8 taking a long time

N7BCP

Flex 6500, MacBook Pro running windows 8.1 64 bit.  Started from "cold" boot of computer and radio.  Closed (exited) smart cat and DAX.  Downloaded SSDR 1.3.8.126 from Flex Radio download page.  Installed it without error and launched Smart SDR 1.3.8 and the radio was yellow (upgrade) so I selected upgrade and the radio display shows "updating software" and the power LED is pink.  The radio has been showing updating software for over an hour now.  How long should this take?  Should I do something to recover or just leave it?

73
Larry
HB9EYQ

Mickey N4MB

Something's wrong, it should not take long at all. I removed all SSDR components - 1.30, CAT, DAX drivers, etc., and rebooted before installing. A re-install took about 15 minutes.

Nick - W2NER

shut it down and reboot the 6500

N7BCP

Thanks Nick - I did just that, hit radio power button and it powered down without issue -rebooted PC and started SSDR 1.3.8, then powered up radio and it showed up in the radio chooser as yellow again, selected update and radio display shows updating software and power LED is pink - will see if this works now.  If not, I'll uninstall SSDR and start over.

Larry

Jim Gilliam

Had a similar problem. Remove all DC power from the radio after shutting down. Then restore power and turn radio back on and try updating the firmware. Everything should look normal.

Jim, K6QE

N7BCP

after ~30 minutes I shut down the radio and removed DC power.  I then uninstalled SSDR 1.3.8 and 1.3, rebooted and then removed the SSDR installation folder under Program Files.  Reinstalled SSDR 1.3.8 and connected radio DC power and started radio.  6500 showed up in chooser and I started upgrade again.  Just checking out the flex prior to JOTA.

N7BCP

6500 finally upgraded to 1.3.8 - final attempt the radio went through updating software, LED was pink, radio rebooted automatically and SSDR radio chooser stayed at upgrading (yellow) but never noticed the radio was done upgrading.  Closed and restarted SSDR and radio upgrade was complete and seems to work now.  I also noticed that second to last attempt, the radio said "updating software" but LED stayed green and never finished after 30 minutes.  Not sure what actually fixed the issue.

N7BCP

Radio still losing connection.  Pan freezes and then a dialog box showing that it lost connection with the radio.  When it does stay connected I also notice that the pan adapter waveforms are lagging behind the audio by 2-3 seconds - it's obvious when listening to an SSB station, the station stops transmitting but the pan shows the SSB modulation for 2-3 seconds.  Stop and start SSDR gets things back in sync again but this comes back.

W2NER

They know 1.3.8 has a few bugs so if I were you I would back level to 1.3.0

Jim Gilliam

Do you have a second computer to try 1.38 on? I would be very interested to see if the problem goes away by retro-grading to 1.30. Maybe the problem cropped up due to some corruption on the hard drive. These kinds of problems can drive a well-balanced and happy individual to insanity.

DrTeeth

OT: That is one of the reasons why I multiboot. It is so handy having another OS on the same hardware for troubleshooting.

Jim Gilliam

And that is the reason I am a disciple of hard drive imaging.

Jay -- N0FB

How are you running Windows on your Macbook?  Boot Camp?  Parallels?

W2NER

I run it on a iMac 27 with the parallels. Works great haven't had any issues at all.

Jay -- N0FB

Sorry...this question was really for Larry.

Jay -- N0FB

I also run Parallels 10 on iMac 27" with 3.5 GHz P7.   And you are correct....this works wonderfully well.  Parallels also makes it easy to have multiple Windows environments running simultaneously to do A/B testing.

N7BCP

I'm using boot camp to boot windows 8.1 - this is not running on a hypervisor.

N7BCP

Boot camp