Flex-1500, No blue led when power button is pressed

Daniel Solé

First of all, merry Christmas to everybody!

Now, the problem...

I have been working for some weeks with the Flex-1500 and the FT8 mode with no hassle.

I wanted some more power out and I purchased one of those MX-P50M chinese linear amplifiers. I did a cable for the Flexwire using 1 and 3 pins to switch the amplifier as some ham's advised me to do.

When I switched on -in principle all correctly wired- only the chinese amplifier woke up: The Flex-1500 doesn't light up any longer!!

When I press the power button, the blue led doesn't light at all. It seems there is some current consumption because I can hear the fan on the PSU starting as I press the Flex-1500 power button. But no blue led on and no detection from my computer.

I opened the box to check the fuse but the fuse is ok. I didn't see any evidence of something wrong on the PCB's.

Do you have any advise for me? Something to check? Something I can do?

Or do I better send the unit to service?

73 ES GD DX DE EA3GEO, Daniel

Pat Hamp

My first thought is to disconnect everything but power and the firewire and see if you get a startup.

Daniel Solé

Hi Pat, thanks for the answer.

Yes, this is something I tried. I even tried this with the PCB boards out of the metallic case. No way. I really don't know what happened.

Something that puzzles me now is that I have measured 13VDC in the switch cables of the amplifier. For those of you who uses the MX-P50M, is this that way? Is this how it works?

Tks & 73 from Daniel, EA3GEO