Bad Connector Blues – How a loose wire cascaded

Just finished a multi-day troubleshooting, repair and clean up following a simple loose power connector.

May 14th operating remote my station went down. Remotely rebooted the radio, and it went down over an over. Ran okay on Receive, but croaked on transmit.

And my remote client software was acting weird.

Things being what they were I didn’t physically get to the radio until evening, where I found the same thing was happening when operating from the shack. But now I could see the on-radio diagnostic error message:

The radio message while hung up

The next evening I set out to troubleshoot.

Moving over to my spare Flex-6700 the same crash on transmit was duplicated. I downgraded the backup radio to latest public release of SmartSDR thinking perhaps something from software testing had reared its head.

Still crashing. Multiple cold restarts, same thing.

So back to basics. Take things apart, inspect and reassemble. Both Hardware and Software.

The voltage drop clue from the error on the radio was the only smoking gun, or so I thought.

The positive connection at the back of the power supply was not as tight as I recalled installing it.

Seems that reduced connection was an issue, and I was back up operating from the shack computer.

But remote was all messed up. Seems something “ate” the CAT configuration and what ports CAT could see were different than what other software could see!

Noticing that I had perhaps close to 20 different versions of SmartSDR on my remote computer (remember I do version testing of releases only provided to the Alpha test team) it seemed like a great opportunity to tidy things up.

So removed all the copies off the machine, and reinstalled a fresh copy of the latest public release and the last Alpha release I was testing.

Still no joy, even after rebuilding the SmartCAT ports.

The port issues also seem to be related to this week’s Microsoft security updates, and pointed towards a FlexVSP driver issue. Nothing at all to do with the power connector issue.

So did a remove and reinstall of the FlexVSP drive (check the notes on their website about this), another cold reboot, adjusted a few settings to use the ports that now all software agreed existed, and back on the air making QSOs.

So the causes were at least three things:

1. Loose Power Connection
2. Corrupted SmartCAT configuration dropped SmartCAT configurations
3. Corrupted by Updates the FlexVSP driver was puked

While I have things sorted out and back running, it is time to redo my notes and configuration snapshots, and the questionable power connector & cable will be repaired further or replaced.

I would have saved much time if I had kept my configuration notes current, and if I had been a bit better about housekeeping by removing old versions.

Fortunately 98% of the repairs didn’t need much user intervention, and the parts that did were easy.

73

Steve
K9ZW