Pro-2022 Battery Beep Problem

Hello! I bought my 93 year old father a Pro-2022 online & he received it today. He loves listening to the weather broadcasts. The radio has a problem that's driving me nuts. The low battery indicator beeps & blinks constantly even with a brand new 9V battery. I tried the reset button on the back & it made no difference. It seems there is no way to turn it off. Any solution you could provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Could be a broken wire from the 9 volt battery connector to the main board. If you program the radio and unplug it from the wall (with 9V battery connected) does it remember the programming or does it lose the programming?

It retains the memory.

You may need to keep it unplugged from the wall for several hours to allow capacitors to drain. Beyond that it would be necessary to get a voltmeter and probe the comparator circuit that evaluates battery condition. From the schematic it looks like cutting pin 7 of IC2 is a brute-force way of disabling the battery detector circuit if you can't fix it otherwise.

you could try

a small amplifier on the tape out jack.
some radio shack stuff does not pass the beep on that.

I have the same issue with a PRO-2004. I've seen it discussed on this forum.

pro92b,

Have you seen a fix for it? I haven't drained it because of lost programming.

pro2004

the tape thing is how i am using my 2004.
no beep on keystroke or i guess the battery as that went out last week and never gave a peep.

I don't see a tape out jack on the PRO-2022. PRO-2004 discussion really should be in another thread.

on this page

http://www.repeater-builder.com/radio-shack/pro-200x/pro-2002-om.pdf
it is on the back, left of center.
the reason for the 2004 here is that it could be similar. (no beep)

wtp said:

http://www.repeater-builder.com/radio-shack/pro-200x/pro-2002-om.pdf
it is on the back, left of center.
the reason for the 2004 here is that it could be similar. (no beep)

Click to expand...

The manual you referenced is for a PRO-2002. This thread discusses the PRO-2022. Very different radios.

ya got me

yep it is the 2002 and the 2022 does not have a tape out.
but i tried !

It was unplugged all day without the battery & the beep was still there. I saw a YouTube video about a Pro 2006 & cutting a pink wire near the front of the radio & attaching a ground wire to it and connecting it to the chassis (ground) to get rid of the beep. I wonder if that fix would apply to the 2022 as well?

pro92b said:

You may need to keep it unplugged from the wall for several hours to allow capacitors to drain. Beyond that it would be necessary to get a voltmeter and probe the comparator circuit that evaluates battery condition. From the schematic it looks like cutting pin 7 of IC2 is a brute-force way of disabling the battery detector circuit if you can't fix it otherwise.

Click to expand...

The PRO-2006 and PRO-2022 are quite different. The PRO-2006 has separate PC boards for the main RF and logic (CPU) circuitry. The wire you asked about is part of a cable that connects the RF to CPU boards. In the PRO-2022 everything is on one board so there is no interconnecting cable.

A few random notes:
The youtube video for the PRO-2006 shows him testing the modification by unplugging the radio for a few seconds and then confirming that the programming is not lost. This proves nothing as there was no time for capacitors to discharge in the scanner.

I wanted to find out if your programming was intact after the radio was unplugged all day. That will give us an idea whether the 9 volt battery is actually connected to the radio main board or not. The beep is due to a fault and no combination of button pressing or unplugging the radio will change that.

Do you have a voltmeter and do you have any experience working on electronics?

pro92b said:

You may need to keep it unplugged from the wall for several hours to allow capacitors to drain. Beyond that it would be necessary to get a voltmeter and probe the comparator circuit that evaluates battery condition. From the schematic it looks like cutting pin 7 of IC2 is a brute-force way of disabling the battery detector circuit if you can't fix it otherwise.

Click to expand...

I do have a voltmeter but haven't used it in many years. I would be willing to cut pin 7 if that would get rid of the beep without harming the radio in other ways. It wouldn't matter if the battery backup functioned. Where I live there is only about 20 active channels

Cutting pin 7 breaks the circuit to the battery condition detector only. If the battery is connected and provides memory backup it will continue to do so after pin 7 is cut. The picture shows where the relevant circuit points are located.

Before cutting pin 7 it would be interesting to measure a few voltages to see what is not right in the circuit. Most meters have a red probe and a black probe for connection to measurement points. Connect the black probe to the radio's ground, any convenient point on the metal chassis. With a 9V battery connected, plug the radio into the wall socket and turn it on. Touch the meter red probe to IC2 pins 5, 6, and 7 and note the readings.

Pin 5 should be about 4.5 volts with a new 9V battery connected to the radio.

Pin 6 should be about 2.85 volts.

Pin 7 should be 5 volts with a good 9V battery connected and a correctly working detector circuit. If the voltage is near zero the detector thinks the battery is weak or missing.