A Mostly Good Day

Lots of little things today.

On the way out of the neighborhood this morning, I had my little SDR running, centered on 145.33. At the house, I saw a pretty strong birdie at exactly 144.000 and it never went away all the way to work, so I presume it’s an artifact from the laptop or perhaps in the radio itself. There was a tiny peak just above the repeater at 145.4125, but it went away by the time I got out to the truck, so it was probably something in the kitchen.

rfi-1

 

Interestingly, Oncor called me today with an update. Basically, my incident has been assigned to an RFI tech. I can expect to hear from them maybe Friday, but probably next week.

There was talk on the repeater today about a short Fusion Digital net right after the regular Six Shooter Net, so I put the FTM-100DR on the workbench so I could use the big antenna and have the best chances of joining in.

On the FM net, I tried to check in on *every* round and was never heard. I guess I need a beam or some more altitude. With the assistance of GoogleMaps, I have determined that I am 28 miles line-of-sight from the repeater. I am considering a three element beam. It would definitely have enough gain going that direction and would likely be wide enough to reach other Fort Worth area repeaters as well.

I eventually gave up and used the time to upgrade the firmware in the radio. I had plenty of time because it was the first time for a particular lady ham to run the net and people came out of the woodwork to check in for her. By the end of the net, she broke both standing records for length of a Six Shooter Net by three minutes and number of unique checkins by ten, even without mine!

So, the FTM100 firmware update procedure is split into three separate elements, the system, the display/control panel and the DSP. Before any of them, you connect the data cable to the PC and run the update program. It shows directions, which are also explained in an accompanying PDF in greater detail.

For the main firmware, you remove power, set an update switch reachable behind a rubber plug on the top of the radio and apply power. The weird part is that the radio in this mode shows no signs of life. You just click the OK and it starts loading. After it finishes, you are to remove power, set the update switch back, power up, perform a factory reset then verify the version.

The panel is different in that you hold down a two key combination on the panel as you power on the radio. It puts the radio into a mode specifically for panel updates. Then you flip an update switch and press a reset button reachable behind a rubber plug on the back of the control panel. Click ok and it starts loading. When it finishes, you again power cycle, do a factory reset and verify the version.

The DSP is similar to the panel. You hold down a different two key combination on the panel as you power up, then press a key on the panel to get to the DSP update mode and click OK. Interestingly, the DSP update didn’t claim to need a factory reset and definitely showed to be updated by the version numbers.

After the factory reset, you lose the callsign and all your channel memories and any other settings. It’s probably best to backup all to an SD card before the updates then restore from SD afterwards. In my case, I had both the SD card and the programming software.

So far as I can tell, the updates didn’t fix anything that I was aware of 🙂

So by that time, the record-smashing Six Shooter Net on FM had concluded and they had anyone who could do digital do a quick checkin with their location. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t make it, but 16 others did.

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