Low Tone When TXing on conventional

phillydjdan · Feb 8, 2015

I'm stumped. I'm trying to program an XTS-5000 UHF on conventional channels. The MDC burst is transmitted and I hear the sidetone from the speaker, but then it immediately emits a low-pitched tone (similar to the unprogrammed tone) from the speaker until I release the PTT button and nothing transmitted. I have poked around quite a bit, but can't seem to figure out what setting I have wrong. Model # H18SDH9PW7AN, flash is 500008-000482-8. Any help would be appreciated.

RKG · Feb 8, 2015

phillydjdan said:
I'm stumped. I'm trying to program an XTS-5000 UHF on conventional channels. The MDC burst is transmitted and I hear the sidetone from the speaker, but then it immediately emits a low-pitched tone (similar to the unprogrammed tone) from the speaker until I release the PTT button and nothing transmitted. I have poked around quite a bit, but can't seem to figure out what setting I have wrong. Model # H18SDH9PW7AN, flash is 500008-000482-8. Any help would be appreciated.

We encountered something like this a couple of years ago, and it stumped us for a while. I'm away from where I could hunt around for notes, but I seem to recall that it had something to do with encryption strapping.

I'd start by going back and proof reading your personality and channel settings.

phillydjdan · Feb 9, 2015

Anytime you can get a moment to check your notes. This thing has me pulling the rest of whatever hair I have left out lol

RKG · Feb 11, 2015

Going to be a while. In the mean time:

Go to either Radiowide or Secure and uncheck "secure equipped."

Check personalities and be sure Tx and Rx are set for "non-Astro". (At least for the moment; if you need digital you can go back after we solve the problem.)

Go to zone/channel screen(s) and be sure strapping is " clear."

Go to controls and be sure no button, switch or menu item is defined for toggling secure/clear.

What I seem to recall is that issue had to do with warning user that radio was trying to transmit clear when secure was selected.

The other possibility, which I should have mentioned earlier, is that the radio may need an alignment. The "boop" tone could be saying synthesizer is having trouble locking.

phillydjdan · Feb 11, 2015

I will check that out and let you know, thanks

sfd119 · Feb 12, 2015

RKG said:
What I seem to recall is that issue had to do with warning user that radio was trying to transmit clear when secure was selected.

I know what you're talking about, it's the Clear Air alert...however, it doesn't sound like the unprogrammed bonk that the Op was describing.

phillydjdan · Feb 15, 2015

Ok, so I did some experimenting. I could not get the radio to transmit properly no matter what I did. I tried different flashcodes and custom codeplugs to no avail. Just for S&G I force wrote the one codeplug into a different radio (a Model 2 vs Model 3) and was able to transmit with no issues at all. So, if the same codeplug loaded into my personal radio works but still emits the low tone (like unprogrammed) on the other radio, then could the issue be the alignment of the radio or something? An identical codeplug in 2 XTS-5000's should do the same thing in theory, right? Am I crazy or what?! lol

captaincab · Feb 16, 2015

Sounds like an alignment issue is possible. I am not a expert on this series of radios but if it was a jedi series i would be thinking that could be the problem hope it helps Dan.

com501 · Feb 16, 2015

You have an S split radio, is the frequency in question near the band edge? Have you tried putting in several frequencies throughout the S split band several megs apart too see if the radio is actually out of lock?

This is very rare.

You might want to grab a bare codeplug from the CPS and load that and see if the problem goes away. Barring that, delete EVERYTHING in the radio and start over with one basic mode, personality, zone and see what happens. A corrupt codeplug can create all kinds of headaches.

phillydjdan · Feb 16, 2015

Well, here's what we ended up trying after I posted last night. I had the guy write the original codeplug that was in the radio when he got it back into the radio. Sure enough, the radio transmitted fine. He then threw in frequencies in the 453 and 460 ranges and tried those, and the worked. For some reason he wasn't able to get the MDC signalling to work, but i will have to dig more into this codeplug in the next few days to see where I am going wrong. So at this point it does not appear to be an alignment issue. So much for whatever hair I had left! lol

phillydjdan · Feb 19, 2015

Well, now I'm REALLY stumped! I ended up creating a fresh codeplug using the model, serial and flashcode numbers on the label, and it works. Conventional channels work with MDC, trunking works, everything. I'm not sure what the deal is, but if it's working now I'm not going to question it any further lol.
I had poked around through the original channels a bit and discovered a bunch of ham channels in it, which had me suspicious. It is an S split radio, so I had thought maybe the last owner had retuned the radio to operate that low, but since it's working now I'm not going to speculate further.

Skypilot007 · Feb 19, 2015

Is the CPS you have been using hex edited to go out of band? If not that is likely what has been causing problems. If the radio had ham channels in it and its an S split, someone used modified CPS to program those channels into it. No a bad thing to do, it works great. But if you read a radio with unmodified CPS that was previously programmed OOB with modified CPS, then add or remove channels you would need to delete the ham channels or anything OOB because things are gona get weird when you try rewrite the OOB channels with unmodified CPS. I'm surprised it even wrote the codeplug back to the radio without barking at you about the OOB channels. Glad you got it working again. Staring fresh is pain but it usually works in cases like this.

Low Tone When TXing on conventional

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