Spectra woes

[Bowlieweekender]

Just got a VHF high band Spectra D43KXA7JA5BK

First Spectra I've had, pulled the codeplug, totally forgot to back it up, made initial frequency changes, radio programmed and worked fine, made second minor changes and again the radio appeared to program fine. But now hitting the PTT causes the radio to die and reboot itself.

The lesson of the day as always is BACK UP THE SUPPLIED CODEPLUG, lesson duly learned.

Any ideas why it might be rebooting itself?

Cheers Nigel

[wa6ylb]

I've seen this happen from two things. One is that RF from the radio gets back into the radio. The second is that the
current is limited into the radio, due to a bad power supply, resistive power line or such.
Take you volt meter and slightly pull the main power plug out and watch the 12V line when you transmit.
Usually its one of those two things.
The other thing I have seen is a rig that goes out of lock. When that happens, an error code shows in the
screen (fail 001 comes to mind).
In any case most of the trouble you mention is due to power.

B.

[Bowlieweekender]

Thanks B

Your second guess was right on the money, I tried the radio again with a voltmeter and the Motorola HPN4001B power supply took a dive off the pier. Now I need to uncase it and see if it was the internal fuse or if the supply which I bought of eBay a week ago now sleeps with the fishes.

Appreciate the advice and direction!

Cheers Nigel

[linkinpark9812]

Actually this happened to me once before. I would go to transmit, and would get no errors, but the radio would just reboot itself. Turns out I still had the RIB connected to the Spectra (Mine it the 110 Watt VHF Trunk Mount) with the RIB powered up. I unplugged the RIB and everything worked.

I know you said that the voltage went down, but when i transmit high (110W) in my car, my volt meter goes from ~13 volts (when car is running) to 2 volts, which i think is very inaccurate because all of the other accessories in my car still work when transmitting, as well as the radio transmitting just fine.

Not sure if this is your problem though. It would be unlikely that it is a codeplug problem IMO.

Good Luck!

[Bill_G]

hoo boy. Those supplies are not that great. Find yourself another power supply.

[kb2cxj]

the same thing happened to me. try in on a dummy load. for me it was my antenna. bad SWR I changed the antenna and never had the problem again. when the RF comes back down the line, the radio shuts flips out. for a time when I hit PTT it would stay keyed up on the air. had to pull the power plug off the back to get it to stop.. lol