I am having trouble with the radio where the power light ends up flashing and will not accept firmware or configuration from the PC. I found many threads with issues programming radios. My question is: if the power light never goes solid, is there any hope or is the unit dead (no bootloader/etc)? Are there any tools available to recover this?
Asking because this is the 2nd radio in a row with this issue, out of the box. Just plugged into 12V barrel jack and power light never ends up solid. I was able to program an old radio no issues with the exact same setup. Thanks.
You are almost certainly experiencing the issues with the proper setup and timing for dealing with your radio, especially with two in a row. Since your know your same PC succeeded with another radio, it’s probably worth trying to get the timing right before trying another PC.
Make sure you have a good Ethernet cable. It sometimes helps to use a switch, so the laptop Ethernet port stays connected, but I’ve personally never found that this was required. Plug in the Ethernet, and use the port on the radio that’s next to the power jack. Bring up the radio utility. Plug in the radio power and wait a couple of minutes, then try to configure the radio. If it asks for firmware update, do that.
If this doesn’t work, try power cycling the radio and then start another attempt to configure the radio right away. If you are still not successful, ask someone else to try, ideally with another PC. Follow the instructions carefully, including disabling other network adapters.
Thanks for the response. The instructions mention waiting for radio to complete power on and power light to go solid. But these two radios never get in that state.
I have tried 4 computers, multiple ethernet cables, rebooting comptuer, all network adapters disabled, no firewalls, reinstalled npcap etc. But with a blinking power light even after 2, 5, 10 minutes, does any of that even matter? I havent found any concrete info describing radios in this state. The second troubleshooting step is:
Make sure you wait long enough that the power light has stayed solid for 10 seconds.
A factory fresh radio has different firmware on it and the LEDs don’t behave the same way. You may have to just try different timings. I don’t have a factory fresh radio to check, but the radio will go into the bootloader and you can install new firmware shortly after a power cycle. If you know you will need it, you can explicitly choose to do the firmware. Timing is the main thing here – for firmware update, you want to catch the radio soon after a power cycle.
Not sure if it’s related to your issue but the 1 thing that always borks the radio update for us is not having the latest version of npcap installed, the version that comes prepackaged always causes issues
OK I’ll go back and try to mix up the timing with power on and loading firmware to see if it works. I did once get the first one (from factory) to that step, but the firmware load timed out after hanging for a few minutes.
Solved it. The solution is ridiculous but I decided to try what was recommended near the bottom of this thread from 2017.
Here is what I tried, in order, hope this may help some team in the future:
Update Npcap to latest version, mine was out of date. Unfortunately it did not solve the problem. At this point, firmware load would timeout every time
Try combinations of power on / off when opening the config utility, no change 3) PLUG IN A NETWORK SWITCH BETWEEN LAPTOP AND RADIO
The instructions explicitly say not to do this. It worked like magic. They really should update the “troubleshooting” steps to include this. Something about keeping the link up through the switch maybe helps?
RE: blinking power light, part of that mystery was solved too. From the factory the power light has a slow blink, this must mean no firmware. During bootup with firmware present, there is a rapid blink for a period of time. The radio instructions mention blinking power LED, they are likely talking about the “rapid blink bootup state”.
I would like to hear an opinion from another computer guy here but your number 3 above suggests you were using a crossover Ethernet cable. Adding the network switch (which likely has auto handshake) fixed the crossover issue.
My guess is the PC/laptop port did not come up following a power cycle before the radio got past the time window where the boat loader could be caught. The switch ensures the PC/laptop port is up the whole time – the switch port presumably comes up very quickly.
I haven’t seen a PC/Laptop made in at least the last decade that didn’t include an auto-negotiating NIC, rendering crossover cables all-but obsolete.
It might help the port come up more quickly if auto-negotiation were disabled – both for crossover (MDI/MDIX) and speed. Of course, now that you have the right F/W, you won’t have an occasion to try this out. But, in case it may help someone with no easy access to a switch:
I think that the number of people who are going to miss the current radio is zero.
