MSF5000 Secure station - can't read or write codeplug

[qball]

I have a VHF MSF5000 secure capable station that work just fine. Well, except that I can't reprogram it.

I have a working RIB and good cable, but cannot read or write to the station. The RSS times out and tells me to check the connection to the station.

Any ideas? It's a great repeater, and I hate to see it go to the "pile" vs. being used as a good 2 meter repeater.

Thanks!

Q

[motorola_otaku]

Which cable are you using, the 50-pin or the 6-pin RJ version? Try the opposite if you have both available.

The only time I have ever encountered a no-read problem resulted in the pins being swapped on my allegedly "good" 6-pin cable. I have also used laptops with 1.2GHz or faster processors that ran MSF RSS and communicated with the repeater just fine (in pure DOS, of course) so it's not a processor speed/BIOS caching issue.

[qball]

Thanks for your thoughts!!

I am using the 6 pin version from Polaris. I believe the same cable has been used to program the station, but I am not positive. I checked and re-checked the pinout, but maybe I will do it again.

I wish I had the 50 pin cable to try, and I guess I could make the connections to the station without buying a 50 pin cable. The PC I am using is running true DOS, and it is what I use to program all of my equipment from the era.

Any thoughts swapping SCBs? As well, I have thought about using a different station to program the eeprom and swap the eeprom back into my station when programming is complete. Do you know if the eeprom can be programmed with a 1801 programmer...or does it have to be programmed in the station?

[motorola_otaku]

If you have a CXB station it has to be programmed with RSS.

It's entirely possible that the mic jack has a problem (dirty/corroded contacts or bad/broken solder) so I would definitely try to cobble together a 50-pin cable and try that. As for swapping EEPROMs.. if you have access to another known working station why not use it to test your programming kit?