Lost connection to radio:

Mike Krzystyniak

Greeting to the Community,

   My Flex 6700 has been running fine for a couple months with SSDR 3.1.12.  The radio is on 24/7 sans and aside from manually power off to wait out a few passing storms where afterwards operations always powered up and returned to normal.  So, some 5 days ago some weirdness creeps into the shack....

Lost Connection to Radio: Four times now over the past 4 days I came into the shack at random times and see the radio is disconnected (lost communications). The symptoms were.

i) The 6700 is locked up tight and requires the 5 second button push to turn off, then a press to turn on and reboot.

ii) Restarting SSDR the radio available banner suggests the radio is already in use and wants to log me in as user #2 in Multi Flex mode.  I found I have to reboot the PC to clear this error.

iii) Once the PC is rebooted I have a clear first user "connect" banner, the SSDR launches but comes without an assigned frequency (no persistence values).  A point and click anywhere on the pan-adapter RX window and it loads the RX parameters and acts like a RX again. Although not fatal this part is an observation.

iv) This morning while trying to get N3FJP Contest logger talking to WSJT-X and Flex 6700, several time more or less at random I hear the Windows Chime tone and the radio is disconnected (lost communications).  I have done Radio and PC resets, and with the last event I decided to try a power off reset.  Still waiting on that one to if it will stay connected. 

v) Unrelated?: Recently on the PC reboots and power ups I have been getting a random windows nvcpl.dll, an error related to NVIDIA?  I see this message about 1/4 of the time. Clicking okay it clears.

vi) I did get a W10-update pushed earlier in the week. Thinking that was it, I backed it out and restored the previous rev of W10.  I have not seen any difference. 

    Any thoughts, suggestions, or ???  would be appreciated.  Murphy's Law right, always before the contests.

Thank you  73   Mike K9MK 

   

Wayne VK4ACN

Mike
Had a similar issue, my 6500 in recent weeks had started to lose connection.  I tried Michael Walkers suggestions as this post

https://community.flexradio.com/flexradio/topics/radio-dropping-off-line-solutions

Went into Ethernet Adapter in Device manager on PC. Found Nic card.  Turned off all power save settings.  I thought I had already done that in the past, not sure if during a windows update they got turned on again.  Also under advanced tab, changed speed of Nic card from auto negotiation to 100m full duplex.  So far so good.  Seems to have fixed the annoying problem.
May work for you but worth a try.

Wayne
VK4ACN

Patrick

You may need a SD card in the 6700.  Same happened to me.  Open a ticket with flex.  The fix is free.  How old is your 6700 or 6500.  My 6500 was over 6 years old.  

Mike Krzystyniak

Thank you Pat, My Flex is 4+ years old.  I had a new SD card installed about 2 months ago along with 3.1.12.  I hope it was supposed to last longer than this.  

Mike Krzystyniak

Connection Lost Update: In my analysis I did check the items on Mike Walker's check list.  All looked good there.  Moving on and getting ready for FD I did install both N3FJP contest program and WSJT-X 2.2.2 this week. Coincidentally this is when things started to get goofey.  I never got N3JFP integrated with WSJT-X and the FLEX.  And I noticed that in FD mode WSJT-X 2.2.2 would close on every 4th QSO.  Yup, simply close it self.  

So I rolled back to WSJT-X 2.1.2 and completely uninstalled the suite of N3FJP programs, did a 1 minute power off unplugged reboot and so far... KYFC....  Been up for 21 hours now and still looking strong.  

PS:  IMHO the initial connection lost messages were due to the FLEX locking up.  But what I don't is why it locked up.  The client(s) shouldn't be able to do that.
  
Thanks, 73   Mike K9MK