excrutiatingly loud audio

Walt - KZ1F · January 2015

After 8 months of use with no hint of this problem. I fired up my windows image, SDRCat started, I started the 6500 and waited for it to fully start then started SSDR 1.3.8. My headset was sitting nearby and after I hit connect there was amazingly loud static Uncomfortably loud, hurt the ears loud. I thought maybe it was the band and switched bands, almost jumped out of my skin it was that loud. I puled the headphone jack and shut off the radio. This part is not necessarily relevant, the radio was in one of those 1.3 states where pressing the on/off did not immediately start the power off sequence.

I powered the radio back on and it came up normally, normal band, normal volume. I have seen times where SSDR isn't actually connected to the radio, even though the icon came up and highlighting it enabled the connect button but when it came up there were no profiles no last band panadapter. This wasn't one of those times, it came up on the prior band but just full (or more than full) volume.

This is a 6500.
Walt - kz1f

Jay -- N0FB · January 2015

Check to make sure that your AGC is not set to "Off". Set it to Slow, Medium, or Fast. Also set the associated slider to below 50 (for most cases). Adjust slider for optimum signal to noise on the audio. See if this fixes your loud adio issue.

Tim - W4TME · January 2015

Walt - It is difficult to tell exactly what was going on, but I suspect that the one of the internal processors may not have booted properly and power cycling the radio reset everything.

Walt - KZ1F · January 2015

Thanks Tim, Jay - thanks, that was the first thing I checked.

It never happened before and hasn't since but what concerned me is 'it never happened before'. I was fairly certain with what I told you it wasn't going to be actionable. Usually it is really good about immediately providing positive feedback when the power button is hit to shut it off. Earlier releases had an issue, as I recall, but 1.3x seemed fine. When I had the noise the power off button did not provide the positive feedback for about 30+ seconds (I am guessing at the 30 as I stopped paying attention to it. It was a while. So the two paired maybe provided something.

Thanks Tim, thanks Jay.

Walt - KZ1F · February 2015

Hi Tim, It happened again. The order, this time, appears to be different than the order last time.
1) Fired up Windows
2) Fired up Cat (it was done via windows)
3) I either started SSDR before powering on the radio or shortly after but the radio was not fully booted.
4) after the radio appeared I connected to it.
5) I forgot the symptoms from the band it was left on. It wasn't excruciatingly loud but it was 'off', it sounded weird causing me to switch bands to see if it exhibited the same weirdness.

BOOM switching the band caused the excruciatingly loud output.

Anything else I could add would be without certainty it happened or happened how I recall it, so I don't want to say anything misleading. I don't recall if I simply restarted the box or recycled the Astron. I've been using the radio a lot in the last couple of weeks and always shut it off (at the power button) every night. This is clearly not happening the majority of the time, but now it is not a singular occurrence. Where it's happened twice in the last two weeks, and nothing prior, I am guessing it isn't 1.3.8. So this isn't even under warranty now, is it? Nobody else has reported this???? I hope I saved the box you folks shipped it in. As much as I don't want to send it back, I'd feel better if it were a solid failure, software or hardware. Any thoughts?

One thing I should add, which just started happening..may or may not be related:
I was on a band and switched to another. The audio was not turned off but there was no audio, not even a slight background noise. Cycling the speaker icon in the slice had not effect. The AGC setting made no difference whatsoever. I switched back to the prior band and switch back to the band I had the issue on and volume was fine. That was yesterday, the radio was powered off between these two events. Again, may not be related.

Thanks,

Walt

excrutiatingly loud audio

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