Replacing the SD Card in a FLEX-6400

K5BGP

I received my SD card in the mail today from Flex with v3.2.39 after my radio started flashing red.

This is the second SD card replacement I've had to do since I've had the radio for nearly two years. The first time I replaced it, I did it myself, but it's been a while, and I want to follow written instructions.

But where are the instructions? I went to the FlexRadio help page and typed "SD CARD", and "SDCARD" with no luck.

Are there instructions for replacing the SD Card that I can reference?

Trucker

If I remember correctly, my replacement card from FRS came with an instruction sheet. You might contact the Help Desk and get them to send you instructions.

James

WD5GWY

K5BGP

Thanks James. I looked for a sheet of some kind but there was none in the cardboard envelope. As I recall, I powered down the radio, took the cover off, replaced the SD card, and put the cover back on. But isn't there some voodoo that you have to do to re-establish licensing?

Trucker

If your email address is good on qrz.com I can email you a pdf file they sent me detailing the procedure for replacing the SD card.

James

WD5GWY

Trucker

They probably sent you the same pdf file via email as they did for me. I had just about forgot about that. But, I got to thinking about it and decided to look back at my emails for the time my SD card had to be replaced and found the instructions attached in pdf format and also some extra instructions that helped for saving profiles and also for possible errors that may appear that are not really errors.

If you follow the procedure in the pdf and the extra instructions you should be fine.

James

WD5GWY

K5BGP

James,

Thanks for sending that PDF. I received it just fine.

After reading your last comment, I went back and looked at my message from Tim Ellison, W4TME and sure enough, the same PDF was attached to the email. 🤦

Thanks again for being so helpful and taking the time to assist me with this. I should have looked at my email discourse with Tim more closely.

K5BGP

Update: I replaced the SD Card and the radio is working fine again. Thanks again Tim W4TME and James WD5GWY!

I sure hope that the guys at Flex design their next system with the SD Card interface accessible from the outside. My 6400 is in a rack, so I have extra work to remove it from the rack and remove the rack ears in order to get the top off.

K5BGP

Not so fast... the radio still has issues. It's headed to Austin for diagnosis.

Trucker

Sorry to hear that. But, the good news is Flex Radio Customer Service is good. And their service people really know their stuff. I have had very good luck with them.

James

WD5GWY

K5BGP

A quick update: I got the radio back yesterday after being without it for about 2 weeks. The report from FLEX is that they left it running on the bench for at least 2 days connected to SmartSDR without any issues. Great news!

I got it back yesterday, hooked it up, and was able to hear QSO's just fine over dogparkSDR, then disconnected the client.

Got up this morning to reconnect... no radio seen. Went into my station room and the dreaded single red light is blinking AGAIN.

I just emailed Flex support about it.

Honestly, this is starting to become soul ****, and I'm really missing the rock-solid performance and dependability of my Kenwood TS-590S.

Alan

KF5HEL

Perhaps you have a corrupted profile.

After you did a factory reset, or the radio was returned to you, did you re-load your profiles? If so, perhaps one of those profiles is corrupted and causes the Flex Radio to fail on subsequent re-start.

I have seen this myself.

Do a full factory hard reset, which will remove all of the profiles. Instead of reloading your profiles, re-build them with new profiles.

Alan. WA9WUD

K5BGP

Thanks for the suggestion, Alan. I didn't explicitly reload profiles. I did reconnect with dogparkSDR. Unless it's doing something automatically that I'm not aware of?

I did the factory reset as per this note: https://helpdesk.flexradio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036859212-Resolving-the-single-red-blink-Fan-Error-on-Start-Up

In fact I've done this multiple times, and every time, the radio works for a bit then starts acting erratically.

I wonder... could the client software be at issue here?

BTW, the FlexRadio support team has been great to work with; I'm not faulting them one bit here. I have every confidence they're going to help me get to the bottom of this so I can start enjoying my radio again. It's just frustrating to have to go through this exercise.

Alan

If you can, after another factory reset, try using a different client software, i.e. Mac SDR or Windows SDR, instead of Dogpark SDR.

Your reported observations would point to the client software as having an impact.

Flex would have used their Windows Smart SDR....and found no issues.

I know for sure, through my own experience, that sending the Flex server corrupted commands will cause it to trip off (and hence the blinking green light indicating boot failure).

Alan

K5BGP

Thanks for the suggestion. I decided to try something different:

I completed a factory reset at 7:48am this morning and for 3 hours, I did not connect any client to it. I checked and the radio's power button was green.

So just now, I went through and reset dogparkSDR's settings according to their instructions by holding down a key when launching the software. I then relaunched the software and added my license key again. My radio appears in the list.

I went to File and then Open to obtain a pan adapter window. Now I see the following screens alternating about half a second at a time.

Screen Shot 2022-01-16 at 11.06.48 AM.png

Screen Shot 2022-01-16 at 11.06.55 AM.png

That is still happening as I type this.

UPDATE: I quit dogparkSDR and launched SmartSDR for macOS. It connected right away and put up a pan adapter. I am not interacting with it. I will simply let it run to see how long it will go before something goes awry.

Alan

OK,

DogPark sees the UDP broadcast with your Flex Radio Connection info. Good.

DogPark appears corrupted somehow, since it will not connect.

Or, Is it possible something changed on your LAN such that the UDP Panadapter packets are not getting through?

I see you are an Apple person. Does your IOS Smart SDR see the radio and connect ok?

By the way, I found the MacSmartSDR, available on the App Store, to be an excellent product.

Alan

K5BGP

After 15 minutes of SmartSDR displaying the panadapter just fine and running without issue, I suddenly stopped hearing anything and now I have this screen:

Screen Shot 2022-01-16 at 11.35.27 AM.png

So clearly the problem is manifesting with both dogparkSDR and SmartSDR.

K5BGP

Alan

I have heard others say that Ubiquiti sometimes loses the level Two binding, necessary to move the panadapter UDP packets.

KD0RC

@KF5HEL

I agree with Alan, this is starting to look like a network problem. One thing to try to verify this hypothesis is to plug your computer directly into your radio. If the problem does not manifest itself in this configuration, it is a good indicator that you are having a network issue of some sort.

K5BGP

I did some networking housekeeping on my network rack. I also deliberately made changes and forced a save of profiles from dogparkSDR to the radio. Now it's been up for over an hour without "disappearing" and I've even successfully made a QSO on 20 meters. I'm going to cautiously declare this issue resolved for now without actually knowing exactly what caused the aberrant behavior to stop.

Thank you all for the feedback, patience, and suggestions!

Mike-VA3MW

If you are chasing down network issues, you may want to take some time and use iPerf (or the Windows version jPerf).

It is a free tool that can be used to show actual network throughput.

It isn't hard to use and it is very informative. I found 2 bad network cables with it.

https://youtu.be/Hx2cJAh28oY

Here is a test I ran from my Macbook to my Router (which has an iPerf server running on it)

I did this test on a GIG lan connection:

./iperf3 -c 192.168.113.1

Connecting to host 192.168.113.1, port 5201

[ 4] local 192.168.113.179 port 55569 connected to 192.168.113.1 port 5201

[ ID] Interval      Transfer   Bandwidth

[ 4]  0.00-1.00  sec 81.0 MBytes  679 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  1.00-2.00  sec 81.1 MBytes  681 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  2.00-3.00  sec 80.9 MBytes  679 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  3.00-4.00  sec 79.3 MBytes  665 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  4.00-5.00  sec 80.9 MBytes  679 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  5.00-6.00  sec 81.0 MBytes  680 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  6.00-7.00  sec 81.2 MBytes  681 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  7.00-8.00  sec 81.3 MBytes  682 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  8.00-9.00  sec 81.0 MBytes  679 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  9.00-10.00 sec 81.2 MBytes  681 Mbits/sec          

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

[ ID] Interval      Transfer   Bandwidth

[ 4]  0.00-10.00 sec  809 MBytes  679 Mbits/sec         sender

[ 4]  0.00-10.00 sec  809 MBytes  679 Mbits/sec         receiver

iperf Done.

Next, I did it on WiFi. This is supposed to be an N WiFi connection, but am I seeing N speeds?

./iperf3 -c 192.168.113.1

Connecting to host 192.168.113.1, port 5201

[ 4] local 192.168.113.140 port 55607 connected to 192.168.113.1 port 5201

[ ID] Interval      Transfer   Bandwidth

[ 4]  0.00-1.00  sec 5.40 MBytes 45.2 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  1.00-2.00  sec 5.83 MBytes 49.0 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  2.00-3.00  sec 5.51 MBytes 46.2 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  3.00-4.00  sec 5.82 MBytes 48.8 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  4.00-5.00  sec 4.15 MBytes 34.8 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  5.00-6.00  sec 5.34 MBytes 44.8 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  6.00-7.00  sec 6.62 MBytes 55.5 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  7.00-8.00  sec 6.02 MBytes 50.5 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  8.00-9.00  sec 6.22 MBytes 52.1 Mbits/sec          

[ 4]  9.00-10.00 sec 5.15 MBytes 43.2 Mbits/sec          

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

[ ID] Interval      Transfer   Bandwidth

[ 4]  0.00-10.00 sec 56.0 MBytes 47.0 Mbits/sec         sender

[ 4]  0.00-10.00 sec 55.9 MBytes 46.9 Mbits/sec         receiver

iperf Done.

WiFi was 44 times slower!

YMMV

73

John KB4DU

No one ever gets advertised throughput speeds on WiFi. Those are theoretical maximums.

Ted VE3TRQ

I’m kinda late to this party :-) I had the same sort of issues - radio mysteriously disappearing, errors with the radio, etc. In my case, it was a bad ethernet switch. Removed the switch and have not had the radio disappear in a year. Using a Mac Mini.

Always verify your network components are good - the Flex radio is a network server.

K5BGP

Thanks for suggesting iperf, Mike. I have it installed on my Macs here and use it from time to time to verify speeds between machines.

It's been a few days now and the radio is still working great with no downtime issues. Ted, you're absolutely right... a solid network is critical for the radio's performance.

Mike-VA3MW

Keep providing feedback.

It is easy to make a network function. It is hard to make it work at 100%.

The ethernet is pretty robust and you have to work hard to break it. Sometimes getting it out of first gear takes some investigation.

73

Patrick

To properly evaluate the WiFi performance we need to know what WiFi band was being used. The other issue is, was the WiFi optimized? That is, was the WiFi band examined for interference from neighboring WiFi systems. All this makes a difference and we should see multiple results to tell the full story.

Patrick

Most all WiFi software in WiFi routers will try to optimize by automatically selecting a channel to operate on. Best option is to look at what channels your neighbors are operation on on both the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Manually selecting channels that see less signal or no signals (rare these days) in your area will help minimize congestion and improve throughput. All my neighbors around me pretty much run the same channels set by the software. By setting my channels manually it also seem to signal my neighborhood systems to not operate on my frequency. Much improved throughput is now the norm. 45 MBs should be enough for very good throughput, but to many signals on the same channel my cause problems and unreliable throughput.

K5BGP

Not sure if you're referring to my issue, Patrick, but I wasn't connecting with Wi-Fi; both my station and iMac were connected via ethernet.