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M7300 Lost MRU

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Muxlow

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SO!
Iv got this problems showing on the screen of my M7300. Was doing an update and had a power cycle and computer shut down aswel as the radio. Once the power was back up and the radio came back online it now shows WARNING! Lost MRU

Cant read it with RPM now either and no idea how to recover from this. Its a front mount and i have both the little plugs connected to the rear, and have tried just 1 and none. Nothing seems to work. Anyone know how to fix this issue?
 

ElroyJetson

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My limited experience with this family of radios tells me that they're very sensitive to being interrupted in the middle of a programming cycle.

Sorry to say, but the radio may have to go all the way to Lynchburg to get repaired. And not for free.

I do not recommend updating the firmware on these radios without a COMPELLING reason to do so. If it's working, leave it alone.

They're rather fragile when it comes to firmware updates. Crash the update and they won't know how to communicate with the outside world.
 

Muxlow

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Yeah they seem to be a little.. Mental that way.

Hope there is a way to revive this on my own. Im sure the shop will charge a pretty penny im not willing to spend to kick start this again
 

Radioman96p71

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The OMAP radios function a little different than their older counterparts.

Back in the 7100 days, the bootloader code was programmed into the CPU at factory and was loaded into RAM on power-up, from there it accessed the flash and booted the radio. If you interrupted a radio code update with these radios, you were only out a little time to recover and re-flash the radio. The bootloader (that talks to the PC and has the ability to talk to the flash chip) can't be erased, making them very resilient to bricking.

The OMAP radios do have some code in the CPU, but everything and the kitchen sink is stored on the single 16MB Flash chip. When the radio boots, it immediately reads boot-app portion of flash into the 2MB RAM chip, it then loads the rest of the radio code to boot the radio. You can see the problem coming up here. When you upgrade an OMAP radio, one of the steps it executes is an ERASEALL command, that literally erases the entire flash chip and starts the process of writing over it. The ONLY way the radio is able to function at this point is the burn-app that got pushed to the RAM right before it dumped the flash. If this process hangs, stops, glitches or stops for any reason. The radio/computer doesn't really have any recourse. If you power cycle the radio, you will lose what is in RAM and the radio will power on, but no one will be home. There is no code to execute, so the CPU just sits forever waiting for something to happen. It's the equivalent to installing a new harddrive in a PC and not installing anything, except here you've also nuked the BIOS so you have a big chunk of hardware with no instructions to follow.

Hope that helps (not much i'm sure). I am currently bringing an M7200 back to life using JTAG because i may or may not have accidentally done the same thing :)

I wish we could go back to the <7100 days when they made it a lot more resilient to paperweight mode...
 

Radioman96p71

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JTAG is the diagnostic port on almost all microcontrollers made in the last 25 years or so.

Here is a wikipedia article that outlines its basic functions.Joint Test Action Group - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It basically allows you to communicate directly with the uC and control its pins, letting you talk to any attached peripherals too. It's considerably more complicated than that, but the end result is it would allow me to talk directly to the flash chip by manipulating the correct pins on the uC. I could extract a complete flash image from a good radio and then push it into the doorstop one. It's all pretty experimental at this phase because I am having to pretty much write the program from scratch that will let me talk to it, but this is the exact same technique used at the factory to load the initial programming.

One other avenue i was going to check was hook up the USB interface that they made available and just see what it is reporting itself as. There is no way i could get so lucky that they would allow the uC bootloader to be flashed via USB but its worth a shot!
 

DisasterGuy

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The good news is that if it does need to go to depot for repair it shouldn't be more than a couple hundred bucks.

There is a very important lesson here though for anyone that does any radio programming... ALWAYS have the computer and radio power supply on a UPS.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

greenthumb

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I ran into a similar issue while upgrading one of my Unity mobiles - the CH-100 lost communication with the MRU after upgrading the software through the CH-100. I took a look through the release notes for the software version that I was upgrading to and there was a rather specific set of steps that I should have gone through to do the upgrade, which included doing the MRU first and then the control head. If you have the release notes for the software you're upgrading to, you might want to check them for what needs to be done. It might be as simple as putting the new software into the MRU first and then going back to the control head. I've never had a software upgrade problem with a Harris radio that I couldn't take care using RPM.
 

ElroyJetson

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Thanks for the JTAG information.

Have you tried HDT?

As far as I'm concerned, NOT having the communications firmware in a SEPARATE chip and set up so that a firmware upgrade can't destroy basic communications, is an engineering mistake of LARGE proportions. As long as you have a non-corruptable communications path between the microprocessor and the outside world, any firmware issue can be handled without having to clip into the chip directly.
 

Radioman96p71

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I agree 100%. Moving to this platform where there is no separate ROM "bootloader" or even an EEPROM that was separate from the radio code flash is a horrible mistake. Maybe they were going for a simplified design or just wanted to see how easy it was to make a paperweight but this style of code loading and protection (i use that term lightly) is laughable. All it takes is a couple keystrokes from a console to completely nuke the core operating system.

But it is what it is, at least they left all the JTAG paths intact and the header in place, almost like they expected to need it after manufacturing :)

And yes, I've tried HDT direct to the radio via the 37 pin, no dice. Checking the flash and RAM chips with a logic analyzer, the CPU doesn't even attempt to read from them, so it's just sitting there burning cycles. If they were to release the app they use to initially program them it would be trivial to reflash, but thankfully Texas Instruments carefully documents how to interface with it and use its internal functions to read/write external storage.
 

EDACS_247

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OMAP Radio Compressed Code

Would anyone here be willing to share some current ECP Code for P7200/M7200 & P7300/M7300 Radios?

Or even not so current.

We've got a considerable amount of radios that need to be resurrected.

Particularly P7200 ECP.

Thanks in advance.

Inquiries@EDACSRadios.com
 

EDACS_247

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More about Compressed code...

It seems that we're in the same boat as Elroy with his M7200. Forgive me for being ignorant, but wouldn't loading ALL of the compressed code (Boot, Burn, ECP, MCU, Etc.) into the M7200 followed by programming the radio with personality be enough to fix the problem?

If anyone has some Code that can help, it would be much appreciated.

We're also looking for any and all current compressed code for P7200 portables as well.

Thanks again all.
 

ElroyJetson

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The issue with my M7200 turned out to be that it was set up exclusively for OpenSky, and as such, could ONLY be updated at the Lynchburg tech center.

The design of ANY radio that becomes a brick while updating firmware, to the point where it actually loses the ability to cmmunicate with an external computer, is STUPID AND DEFECTIVE. That should NEVER happen. The I/O path and firmware required to operate it should be sacred and NOT subject to erasure or overwriting.

Both Motorola and Harris are guilty of this titanic blunder.
 

Radioman96p71

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FWIW I purchased one of those radios as well, and it came with TestAPP, which does exactly as you describe. It booted right into a alignment mode and wouldn't talk to any PC. But, i went into the terminal, verified it was actually TestAPP and then pushed BurnAPP, BootAPP, MCU Code and ECP to the radio and it snapped out of it. I since broke it doing some other things but they can be flashed.

These radios DO NOT come with features, the label says they do, but they never made it far enough in the process to be actually feature encrypted. The way they come to you is the way they left the factory before they made it to the shop to be 'finalized'.
 

EDACS_247

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FWIW I purchased one of those radios as well, and it came with TestAPP, which does exactly as you describe. It booted right into a alignment mode and wouldn't talk to any PC. But, i went into the terminal, verified it was actually TestAPP and then pushed BurnAPP, BootAPP, MCU Code and ECP to the radio and it snapped out of it. I since broke it doing some other things but they can be flashed.

These radios DO NOT come with features, the label says they do, but they never made it far enough in the process to be actually feature encrypted. The way they come to you is the way they left the factory before they made it to the shop to be 'finalized'.

That is exactly the case with our M7200's. They all have the TestAPP.

Would anyone here be willing to share the necessary code to revive them?

I wonder if TAC will support the features it was supposed to have.
 

kd8b

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I am not sure you could convince them of what they are "supposed" to have as they only have factory manufacturing test code in them. What the seller claimed and what was on the card that came with mine do not say the same thing. The registration card makes no reference to OpenSky let alone anything else more useful. Mine was not in a MaCom box, it was repackaged so no outer box that would have said anything helpful. I have not given up but with no feature string at all... going to be a tough sell... I am not aware of the existence of such a state "in the field" so there are no listed TAC feature group options to build from scratch, most are add or upgrade from x to y.. Even factory orders deal with packages. Mine did take conventional channels but not sure if they will actually work when I throw it on the bench. P25 anything throw up feature error but conventional I-TACS did not. I will post more after conv testing on 700 and 800..
 
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kd8b

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Regarding Lost MRU M7300

This error will come up from a firmware error on either side of the "system" either the head or the chassis, I know it is a one piece but it is still 2 pieces separated by the MCU code.... You can connect another CH721 head to the chassis and see if the error is on the chassis side or the front mount head. If it is in the chassis side, you might rework it from the attached head if it is connecting... if not you need to reload the chassis from the ground up burn, boot ecp, mcu... through the rear chassis serial port... BTW some versions of ECP require specific versions of RPM or newer or can mess up the radio. If the front mount head is the issue, with a spare CH721 you can disassemble and mount it to that rear panel assy and fix it through the head serial port on the remote head setup. BTW updating CH721 is best done by disconnecting it from chassis can-bus so it is isolated.. cant mess up the other side that way if something goes wrong. :)
 
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