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.