Win500 & Pro-106: Remotely Reboot Radio?

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TonyS

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So I'm sitting here at work (overnight guy called out sick...sure) and have been using Win500's remote monitoring feature all day. I'm logged into my home PC using Remote Desktop and I went to update a local township's system with snow plow TG's. Now, I've never had a problem before doing this remotely. However when I've been at home and go to update my 106 every now and then for some reason my Pro-106 reboots into a wierd error that I cannot remember what it says. I seem to remember pressing the CLR button a few times and then it reboots itself. Well, it's happened just now and it's stuck. Obviously I cannot run home and power cycle the scanner right now. I tried u/l and d/l a saved config file but it's timing out. Is there any way to remotely force the Pro106 to reboot? Thanks.
 
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TonyS

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Just and update: the scanner went into default factory configuration, which is basically nothing programmed into the radio. Power cycling the radio and then programming it solved that. Back in business. So I guess there's no way to remotely reset or cycle the scanner.
 

zzdiesel

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I had a Pro-197 & a PSR600 which both had the same problems as yours. They both had the EEPROM to fail in both radios. It started occasionally kept getting worse. It scared me off of GRE based radios.
 

FireBuff44

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Just and update: the scanner went into default factory configuration, which is basically nothing programmed into the radio. Power cycling the radio and then programming it solved that. Back in business. So I guess there's no way to remotely reset or cycle the scanner.

There are power strips that you can cycle power on remotely. Here are a couple example:

Remote Power Switch - 2 Outlets - Home Automation and Remote Rebooting (Routers, WebCams, Servers, etc), 89 Reviews : 3Gstore.com

Amazon.com : WEB POWER SWITCH WLCD SCREEN 10 OUTLETS : Power Strips : Electronics

Amazon has a bunch of different configurations as well.
 
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TonyS

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ZZdeisel, it only happens sporadically when I'm trying to u/l to the scanner.

Firebuff44, thanks. I should have thought of that myself. I'll take a look at them.
 

kruser

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I had a Pro-197 & a PSR600 which both had the same problems as yours. They both had the EEPROM to fail in both radios. It started occasionally kept getting worse. It scared me off of GRE based radios.

Yep, a known issue with the GRE digital models.
I'm worried we will start seeing more of these issues as these models along with their portable versions age.

Some suspect a bad batch of EEPROM chips but I'm not buying that one.
I think it is just the fact that modern day flash type ram can only have so many writes per cell before cells start failing.
Same rules apply to the nice and fast SSD drives.
People are buying them up for big dollars but many are not aware of the write limitations.
I'm sure things will get better as better flash ram is developed but who knows how long that may be.
Oh, the same rule also applies to things like USB thumb drives and SD type cards etc. They will all start failing after too many writes.

I recently bought a new Samsung model SSD. It's setting allow the user to set aside a sizeable amount of unpartitioned space. By default, it is something like 10% of the total space. While Samsung does not say what this really does, it is there so the drive can swap failing cells with those in the unpartioned space.

Then you have those running XP or lower that is not SSD aware. It will leave all the things turned on that you would normally turn off with an SSD to slow down the amount of writes to the drive. Things like Indexing or Search services, Defrag etc. just to name a couple.
Some SSD manufacturers do now include a utility that is XP aware and will turn off those things that write to the drive that are not needed.
The only problem I really see is when you still have regular drives with SSDs as well. Some of these applications that turn off SSD harming tools, also turn them off for the regular drives so now you have a good performance hit on your standard drives. Then some things are all or none when it comes to disabling SSD harming services. There is sometimes no way to disable some things on just the SSD drive.
Of course XP is going EOL soon so that may help as people abandon it for Vista or higher whcih is where SSDs become recognized by the OS.

But... the same failures in the GRE EEPROM's are also the same failures people see in other devices that use flash type ram.

It's kinda funny really when you think about it. Old standard EPROM's still contain their data from over 30 or 40 years ago but today's chips fail. Of course writing new data to a standard EPROM is not very convenient considering you must use a UV light to erase them first!
And then a lot of the older ram that required an external power source to keep it refreshed and hold its content is still going strong to this day as well.
Of course that old ram may not have the speed of today's flash ram.
I've often wondered how much speed the ram really needs to be capable of in your typical GRE digital model.
 

zzdiesel

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I've really attributed it to a possible virus in the data files if that's possible. I used the same file on both of the radios I mentioned. If I ever get another one I'll write a new data file.
 

kruser

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I've really attributed it to a possible virus in the data files if that's possible. I used the same file on both of the radios I mentioned. If I ever get another one I'll write a new data file.

Hey, anything's possible in todays world of electronics.
I'd have never considered a virus though until you mentioned it.

That's all we need is someone writing malicious code and then it gets into the DB here and wipes out everyone's DMA or OO architecture type scanners!
 

smason

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ZZdeisel, it only happens sporadically when I'm trying to u/l to the scanner.

Firebuff44, thanks. I should have thought of that myself. I'll take a look at them.



This used to happen to me regularly. What stopped it from happening is in Win500, I stop the remote control, then do upload to scanner. I have an audio feed separate from Win500 and I can hear the beep when it's done the upload, then I click start again in the remote. It NEVER happens when I upload this way.
 
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