A Good New Year to one and all.
I have a ?BITX V6.1 which is giving me a severe headache, and I need to regain control of the Raduino inside.
Several times I have essayed to run the calibration routines, the last time was interrupted by unusual circumstances, and it has taken a long time to come back to working on the transceiver. Which is still causing me a severe headache!
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The situation is this:-
The receiver seems to be functioning, though it hasn’t been able to reproduce any signals yet.
The problem seems to lie with the Raduino- the display shows the expected layout of square fields to select modes and the various bands; I can swop between VFO’s A and B; the numbers in these boxes can be changed or tuned; the expected text is shown at the bottom of the display, etc.
The tuning ranges I can achieve are initially confusing, rotating the knob clockwise takes the numbers higher and higher, but rotating anticlockwise they go down to a certain point in the MW band, and then increase again. It seems that the calibration is way, way off. Which also seems to apply to the BFO injection.
While rotating the tuning knob and with a short antenna attached, I can hear that the RX tunes through some very high pitched signals, they shriek. These disappear when I disconnect the antenna.?
I surmise I need to run both the calibration routines again and to complete them properly this time.
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BUT how can I start to do this? Pressing the Tune knob does NOT allow entry into the setting up routines, it doesn’t do very much at all except that every 4 or 5 presses it will go to the Fast Tuning mode, And out again after 2-4 presses.?? Strange as it must have worked before!
I cannot enter into the Set-Up functions or any other modes at all.
Repeated power cycling, with a 10-20sec wait has not made any difference. Each time the Raduino reboots and starts up with a white screen then blue and then the normal ops screen.
Nor has pressing the reset button on the Arduino module had any other effect, just the same restart.
This was a little challenging, I made up a special tool of wood, to reach into the space above the Arduino while it was still in place, and with a crank to accommodate the alignment, or lack thereof, getting past the left hand wall of the case. And yes, I am certain I got a reaction to pressing the reset button, which was the same reaction as from a power cycle.
I will borrow a frequency counter to see if the various oscillator frequencies can be ascertained, and I suppose I should check the voltages around the Arduino again. And I’ll try to fit a switch in parallel to the reset of the Arduino.
Note that the unit has been tried with 3 different PSU’s all around 12-13.5V out across the months.
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Can some of you gentlemen help me with suggestions and advice as how to regain control of the Raduino. I would also like to point out I am not well versed in playing with these small processer modules and will need guiding instructions to figuratively ‘hack it’ open.
My experience with advanced computer control only reached to serial RS232 and sometimes RS422 communication and I have trawled through the Groups list but have not found any references there that were relevant to this situation as I perceive it.
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I wonder if I should also ask if these Arduino’s or Raduino boards are still available to purchase?
Peter LB0K
