Batboard

I had a problem arise with one of my Saber 1s tonight. Seems that it won't unmute for any reason what so ever. I had it on yesterday listening to county fire dispatch (which is CSQ), and suddenly tonight it won't unmute at all for me on any channel. When I press down the monitor button, and lock it in monitor mode, it hears just fine, but the speaker will not produce any sound otherwise.

I also tried this on all of my other channels (ham & MURS) and the radio transmits just. No programming has changed. Verified all of the PL & DPL tones are correct on the transmit side of other radios, it's just acting like I've suddenly added in incorrect squelch tones out of the blue. I'd blame it on gremlins over night...but I don't even have a DOS capable machine or cables heh.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on trouble shooting?

Does the Saber behave the same on all your other channels? Or just County fire? (I assume you have your county fire channel presently set to csq. - meaning, if you have it set to PL/DPL, and not CSQ, is there any chance they've changed their PL/DPL?

It's the same for all 12 channels. I've tested it on MURS with 2 other radios programmed the same and it won't unmute for either radio, even though it will transmit and is heard just fine on the other 2 radios. It came out of the blue one day and I don't have a clue why. I even tried every combination of side keys and secure switch to see if they might have PL defeat programmed in somehow but that didn't seem to help either.

Oooph, IIRC I had something like this happen years ago. IIRC it took a saved codeplug cloned back into the radio to fix the problem. Nothing wrong with the radio otherwise, just wouldn't pass audio unless the monitor button was pressed. Have you tried that?

Figured that would be my only option, I was saving that as a last resort since I have to ship it off to a friend to program. I was just curious if anyone had any insight on a quick fix or why on earth it happened. Monitor works just fine, audio is crystal clear, it's just a obnoxious trying to use it. Thanks for all the help everyone!

The Saber has a selection in the radio feature menu for Silent Monitor. In your case it's obviously been
selected so that when you press the side monitor button you hear no noise (what some call static but in
the realm of FM it's called noise). Go into the feature menu and deselect silent monitor with the F2 key.

The kicker with all this is it was working fine for about a week and suddenly changed over night. I had successfully used the radio on 10 of the 12 channels that I had programmed in, and things were working just fine. I'll make note of the silent monitor selection and make sure that's not selected.