Very low and cracky audio on a RPI with a URI-X

Our club have a node on a quantar 900 mhz on top of a mountain (simple USB) . All was working perfectly up to a week after we lost internet on site. went on site loged in the raspberry pi, rebooted same problem. check all connection, every thing was fine. Took the whole thing down the mountain. Connected on the bench. same problem, very low cracky audio. kept every thing powered and just switched the URI for another one that is known to be good. Perfect audio! so I deducted that the URI was bad. removed the uri-x, reconnected to the same usb cable. Again all was fine!

I am flabbergasted. I had connected and disconnected the URI on site. I just did not had one with me.

Could this be a kind of corruption of the USB stack?

Could it be that app_rpt dont like to be unconnected to a network? The outage caused the RPI to loose its IP address as the dhcp server was down.

Any hint would be welcome.

Pierre
VE2PF

Internet availability won’t impact audio. My guess would be a bad connection. Perhaps the USB connector on either the Pi or the URI got a bit dirty or corroded.

PS. Famous quote “Friends don’t let friends do USB” Jim Dixon

I’m having second thoughts. Low and cracky audio sounds like an analog problem, not something USB would do. I’d be looking at the radio connections for a problem like that.

Thanks Tim,

I also vote for an analog problem. I will change the URI as the db-25 that connect on it have gold plated pins. I dont think this connector would be the problem. I will also order some db-24 female to replace on the URI.

I am also building 4 voter board right now. all the chips sockets and connector are soldered on. just need to solder all the rest… wont be long ( joking ) Been a good 2 years I am postponing this… look like it is time to finish them and be ready to switch all this to voters and get rid of the raspberry pi. I already have my vps on a vultur server in NJ, waiting for my /24 allocation on ampr and BGP authorization. and all the repeaters will be on a 44net address. no more nating problem or such things… All on VPN… this will help a lot for sure.

Pierre
VE2PF

With the URI-X be careful you do not select EPROM=1 in the usb config file (usbradio or siimpleusb). Writing anything to the EPROM will trash the URI and could indeed give you crappy sounding audio.

Ken

Good thing to know, but I am pretty sure it was not set.
I will check just to be sure.

···

| Garanti sans virus. www.avast.com |

  • | - |

Le jeu. 15 oct. 2020 Ă  13:01, Ke2n via AllStarLink Discussion Groups <noreply@community.allstarlink.org> a Ă©crit :

| Ke2n
October 15 |

  • | - |

With the URI-X be careful you do not select EPROM=1 in the usb config file (usbradio or siimpleusb). Writing anything to the EPROM will trash the URI and could indeed give you crappy sounding audio.

Ken


Visit Topic or reply to this email to respond.

You are receiving this because you enabled mailing list mode.

To unsubscribe from these emails, click here.

JUst to let all know that the bug was the Quantar. It had a bad U306 chip on the main controler board.
I fixed it by changing the part. It is a surface mount device but it was an easy job of removing it with my reflow station. Just cleaned the pads with solder that contain lead cause it will flow more easily into solder wix and flux, cleaned the pas with isopropyl alcool to remove the flux.

Putting the chip back was just a matter of putting some solder paste on the pads heat the reflow station put the air on the chips and it all went back to its place as if it was never touched.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 3 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.