[Yaesu] MK-V GLitch

[dennis o'connor]

Just a note to notify the group of a minor glitch I had...  The MK-V 
locked up while in receive... The dial would tune, and volume control 
worked, but no other controls worked... Could not change 
bands/modes/filters/xmit/etc... Acted like the front panel was 
disconnected...
Did a power off cycle, no change... Did a soft boot on the processor, 
no change... Did a medium hard boot on the processor, no change...  Did 
the full hard boot on the processor (AKA four finger salute), no 
change... Lots of head scratching... Decided the CPU board had a bad 
chip and the radio was probably toast, so I went to the shed for the 
shipping box... While there I remembered there is a switch on the back 
panel for the lithium battery to the cmos memory... Decided to try that 
before boxing it up...  Now the manual gives the impression that a hard 
boot wipes out everything stored in cmos memory no matter what, but it 
apparently didn't for me... Turned the battery off, hard booted, and 
suddenly it was all working again..

So, there I was, re-dialing in my memory selections, when it locked up 
- again...
"now just a doggone minute, here!"...
At that point I knew there was something going on external to the 
radio, because CPU chips don't heal themselves and then get sick 
again...  After pulling the radio out and examining all the wiring back 
there it dawned on me that I had a USB to com port adapter plugged into 
the com port on the radio, but I had unplugged it from the computer 
recently, leaving the end lay on the bench... I unplugged the com port 
cable off the back of the radio and rebooted and again everything was 
OK...
I used the MK-since then, for the NAQP RTTY contest this past weekend, 
and it worked fine, so I suspect that stray current was being picked up 
on the unterminated USB/COM adapter, and glitching the CPU...

Denny - K8DO

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