6600M Front panel dead.

Steve KD2OM

This morning when I turned my 3 week old 6600M on, the front panel did not light up. No display, no leds, no control. The rear panel hdmi is also not working. The only sign the radio was working was audio from the speaker. I started SSDR and am able to tune the radio. I can also key the mic attached to the radio and I get power out. I turned it off and back on but it is the same thing. I figure at this point that I will just leave it on until I hear from Flex incase they want to troubleshoot it remotely.
A few days ago when I turned the radio on I got the double blinking red led indication. After trying several things I finally got it to run by removing the power completely. The radio operated normally up until this morning.
I submitted a support ticket but since it is the weekend I figured I would mention it here as well. Needless to say this is disappointing, it looks like I will need to use one of my 25 year old radios if I want to operate today.

Steve KD2OM

Bill -VA3WTB

Rick WN2C

Steve KD2OM

That may fix it but I really would rather wait until I talk to the service department in case they want to try something with it. I believe they can get into the radio remotely if they wish. 

WX7Y

Warren-K6WKW

Neal_K3NC

Steve KD2OM

Ted VE3TRQ

It may be unacceptable, but with software, and today’s state of software development, you will just need to accept it once in a while. As long as the developers put effort into fixing bugs as they are found, you cannot expect more. It is entirely possible to save all your profiles and settings by doing a backup - then you can restore all those profiles after a reset. You WILL be doing more resets, I suspect, although so far in two years of using a 6600M, I have not needed to do so - just a power off full restart.

Bill -VA3WTB

Steve, your radio is far more sophisticated then other radios. There is a lot going on inside that box. this may not be a bug, but rather something that can happen. In your radio there are several processors that rely on perfect timing with many components. It is possible that they can get confused or not hand shacking correctly. When something strange happens to your radio a complete factory reset will clear any faults in the processes. Some time simply shutting down and pulling the power cable will reset the basic systems.
In the future remember to save your profiles so yo can bring them back up after a hard reset.

Steve KD2OM

I worked for a radio company for many years and am no stranger to software radios, we just didn't ship radios that needed software resets all the time. As I said in my first post, this is the second time it has been necessary in a very short time. I just hope it is not indicative of a larger problem. 
I will make backups of the profiles and memories for any future issues.

73
Steve KD2OM

Steve K9ZW

@Steve KD2OM

Steve - if you can figure out what is upsetting your setup, that would be very helpful.  

The out-sync power on/off hasn't been reported, and I'm hopeful you can figure out the root cause through observation.

I don't want to jinx anything by saying I haven't experienced the out of sync state, but should I say rather that I didn't know what the fix was (wiping brow, whew...).

Wishing you the best experience with your new Flex-6600M!

73

Steve
K9ZW

Blog:  http://k9zw.wordpress.com  

Harold Rosee

Steve,

I have a friend with a 6400M that had a power failure over the weekend while his radio was on.  We could not get the radio back up resetting it or any other way.  We finally figured out the switch his radio was plugged into died during the power failure.  Once we moved the radio straight into his router it fixed itself and was back up.  I assume it had to download something from Flex.  That is really cool except if the internet was still down he would have had a dead radio for a while.  This is another reason that Flex needs to supply instructions on how to back up the SD card(s) in the radios.

Harold
W5ZZT

WX7Y

Harold, this sounds more like a IP issue between the head and base radio, the 64-6600 uses 2 DHCP IP address's and maybe with the Ethernet switch dieing one or the other IP's got stuck on a different subnet and couldn't find one another and not really having to do with downloading something from FLEX but rather pull a new IP address from the local router.

SDCard backup is a easy process if you really want to do it, simply do a google search for cloning or copy a SDCard, there are some good programs that do a great job copping bit by bit and most are free, just make SURE you have the exact same size, same brand and same series SDCard as the original. 
I have done this MANY times for Raspberry Pie, GPS maps etc. 

73
Bret

bobby

Jon_KF2E

Just curious, are you planning to update the cards every time there is a software update? I assume the image changes every time there is an update.

I'm not sure I would want to open the radio three or four times a year just to make SD backups.

Jon...kf2e

Jon_KF2E

Just curious, are you planning to update the cards every time there is a software update? I assume the image changes every time there is an update.

I'm not sure I would want to open the radio three or four times a year just to make SD backups.

Jon...kf2e

WX7Y