Rebooting?

A few weeks ago, I pulled my 32Gb SD card to copy off the recordings. The radio had been up and recording for several weeks.

When I checked the recordings, it appeared that the recordings had actually stopped weeks before I pulled the card. Since then I've been monitoring to see if this happens again....

Since I was trying to get the firmware updates installed today, I have the radio sitting right in front of me and I just saw something that caught my attention and may be the reason for the lack of recordings....

I just watched the radio reboot for no known reason... and of course, since the recording feature has to be manually enabled every time you power up, it is now no longer recording.

I thought I recalled seeing some earlier/old reports of radios rebooting for no reason....

Is this (still) a known problem?

Note: I was running 1.03.03 but now 1.05.01 since this morning.....

Signed - concerned more now than yesterday......

Could be a bad card.

Voyager said:

Could be a bad card.

Click to expand...

The radio doesn't operate off of the SD card so that thinking males no sense. I want to hear from Uniden on the situation (or others that have experienced the same issue)

Yes, it does. It is constantly writing to the SD card when recording (in either RECORD or REPLAY modes), so it is possible if it hit a bad spot on the card it could cause a glitch.

And yes, others have had that problem and that was the issue.

Funny someone asking for help, then rejecting help. Talk about not making sense...

Gotta say I'm getting pretty ticked off that the 536 apparently keeps rebooting at random times. This wouldn't be so bad and I probably wouldn't even notice if it weren't for the fact that I always MANUALLY enable recording at startup (because for some reason there's no option to make this "sticky" / always enabled as a user option at boot up).

There should be NO reason why the radio reboots as a result of some SD card issue other than possibly at boot time.

I guess you don't understand how media is read.

If you don't want to try a different card to see if that solves the issue, I guess you will just keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.

As stated above this sounds like a budget sd card I would buy a name brand class 10 sd card. Buying budget sd card is like buying a new lexus and putting $50.00 tires on it.

I bet it's corruption of the file system on the card. Try running scandisk or replace it. Reboots could be due to an unhandled exception during a read or write.

I started a similar thread this morning. The 536 in my truck started rebooting for no apparent reason. The it restarted but all I got was the backlight coming on and nothing. I haven't had a chance to pull th SD card and try another one yet. That was my first thought, but it's good to see that others have had this happen and it was only a card problem.

I've seen SD as the cause of this several times. FWIW, I've had the same thing happen on my DashCam (Lukas brand...bought before we got into the business) and a Sony DSLR.

Actually noticed the same thing today with mine. Just happened to stumble upon this post. It seems to have started after the most recent firmware update. I only caught the scanner rebooting once, but a good test is to leave it in record mode for a few hours and see if it's still recording when you come back. (I have already put it in record mode twice today, only to find it's not recording when I come back). Perhaps it's the scanner/wifi dongle renewing the DHCP lease? Going to leave the WiFi adapter disconnected for a while and see if the issue persists.

It that doesn't work I'll try a different SD card and see if that helps. Really hope it's not the firmware as I use my 536 to record 24x7, the only time it's not intentionally recording is when I'm pulling off the audio files.

EDIT: would be nice if you could disable the replay buffer on the scanner. Even though my 536 is constantly recording, having this ability on my 436 might preserve the life of the SD card and help prevent some of the brief lockups while using the scanner.

The 536 in my truck has the dongle, but other than to make sure it works it's not connected. I'll go with the SD card for now.

buddrousa said:

As stated above this sounds like a budget sd card I would buy a name brand class 10 sd card. Buying budget sd card is like buying a new lexus and putting $50.00 tires on it.

Click to expand...

The card I'm using is a fairly new Samsung high end class 10 SD card. I wouldn't call this a "budget" card by any means (nor old and worn out).

As far as I know, the only reason the card is necessary is to load up the database and favorites lists at boot time and to transfer new firmware to the radio (which is a one time thing when new firmware is applied). After that, it's only used for recording (as far as I know) and a fault/failure to be able to record should not result in the entire radio failing/rebooting. The firmware should be able to "gracefully" fail on a write to the SD - not crash the radio.

Add to this that there is (a) no way to turn off all recording (users can only "reduce" the playback buffer to 30 seconds - but not turn it off). and (b) the recording setting does not persist reboots such that even if the radio reboots it would come back up still rebooting.

I fully get that SD cards fail (I have a pile of them and just got two more) but that shouldn't really be the point we're discussing here.

Edited: removed the wifi dongle last night and put the scanner in record mode. It was still recording earlier this morning and I thought I found the issue. Just a few minutes ago the scanner randomly rebooted. Going to run SDFormatter on a brand new SD card and prepare it for use and see if that does the trick.

troymail said:

The card I'm using is a fairly new Samsung high end class 10 SD card. I wouldn't call this a "budget" card by any means (nor old and worn out).

As far as I know, the only reason the card is necessary is to load up the database and favorites lists at boot time and to transfer new firmware to the radio (which is a one time thing when new firmware is applied). After that, it's only used for recording (as far as I know) and a fault/failure to be able to record should not result in the entire radio failing/rebooting. The firmware should be able to "gracefully" fail on a write to the SD - not crash the radio.

Add to this that there is (a) no way to turn off all recording (users can only "reduce" the playback buffer to 30 seconds - but not turn it off). and (b) the recording setting does not persist reboots such that even if the radio reboots it would come back up still rebooting.

I fully get that SD cards fail (I have a pile of them and just got two more) but that shouldn't really be the point we're discussing here.

Click to expand...

If I try to use ANY External speaker, or put the volume over 22 mine will reboot Constantly... It's a Low Power gimmick in the firmware that is set to high or to low. Likely an attempt to circumvent the issues when people were starting their cars. I expect we should have a fix in the first week of 2037

Additional info:

Yesterday I noticed that the radio had once again rebooted and for some reason was HOLDing on a system in one of my favorites list. So I restarted recording and removed the HOLD.

Just got home today and it has once again rebooted (at least once) - recording has stopped again, the the radio is HOLDing again on that same system.

Not sure what the deal is.

Also of note - I do have the latest firmware loaded, the dongle plugged in, and wifi enabled (but not streaming). However, I saw the reboot situation occur last month before the latest firmware (based on the fact that recording stopped a couple of weeks before I pulled the recordings). The only reason I knew the probably reason for the stopping of recordings was the radio rebooting was when it was sitting in front of me and obvious just after loading the latest firmware (I actually saw it reboot for no reason). So, in my case, I don't think the reboots are directly related to the firmware and/or the dongle but I'll do more tests in that area since the radio seems to be rebooting (at least) once a day now.

EDIT: also when the reboot occurs, some departments (QKs) are being enabled that were not there before the reboot. I'm sensing that the pre-reboot settings are not being written to the SD unless/until the radio is powered off (normal shutdown).

You're correct that if you change certain settings and the radio manages to reboot without the "writing to SD card" process, you will lose those settings.

Two things occur to me to ask, the first one especially with the hold behavior:

1. Do you have the USB cable connected and the radio in serial mode?
2. How stable is your mains power? I thought mine was decent until I had a specific UPS once which had diagnostics built-in. It helped me discover AC that was fluctuating between 105 and 122 V.

Jay911 said:

You're correct that if you change certain settings and the radio manages to reboot without the "writing to SD card" process, you will lose those settings.

Click to expand...

...and I assume this only occurs when the radio is shutdown (generally via the power knob) -- sound right? (further indicates no interaction with the SD card during normal operation - except for recordings).

Two things occur to me to ask, the first one especially with the hold behavior:

1. Do you have the USB cable connected and the radio in serial mode?

Click to expand...

The USB cable is not connected at all.

2. How stable is your mains power? I thought mine was decent until I had a specific UPS once which had diagnostics built-in. It helped me discover AC that was fluctuating between 105 and 122 V.

Click to expand...

Power here is very stable (except during occasional heavy thunderstorms in the summer but even then it's fairly stable). I have numerous other electronic devices on all the time - PCs, scanners, etc. -- no issues seen there.

The writing to SD card process happens, in my experience, when you power it off with the knob, or, when the radio goes into "program mode" aka mass storage mode.

Jay911 said:

The writing to SD card process happens, in my experience, when you power it off with the knob, or, when the radio goes into "program mode" aka mass storage mode.

Click to expand...

Interesting. It's a little surprising to me that the only time the settings are saved is under those limited conditions. I go weeks without shutting the radio off and/or going into programming mode.