Hi there,
My eBay misadventures left me with a set of five Motorola R1225 repeaters, from the estate sale of someone who either ran a radio shop or bought a ton of stuff from one.
All five had the pictured (below) connectors on the front, which appear to contain a jumper to allow headless operation and then pass through SPI and ground for programming, plus pass power to the front LED. Four of the five light the front LED.
I set up a 32-bit Windows XP (SP3, Professional Edition) virtual machine and set up the programming software. None of the five radios can be read or pass the ¡°CommTest¡± feature.
The lot of stuff also included a remote head with the ribbon cables, which seems to work and shows channel 1 on the display, plus the ¡°Rpt Enable¡± LED, on all 5 radios. Using the programming cable through this does not work either. I have tried setting it up on all 5 of the R1225s with the same results.
I can use the same programming cable (and the appropriate software) to read a CDM1550 just fine. It¡¯s a USB serial adapter with RJ-45 on the end.
I also tried replacing the cable with a new one from BlueMax49ers, using the FTDI chip. Windows likes the drivers for it and it shows up, and also reads my CDM just fine, but the 1225 software still sees zero of the five radios.
The ribbon cables have the appropriate key for the missing pins, ensuring they cannot be connected wrong, so that is not the problem.
I think one of two things is happening:
1.) I bought 5 defective repeaters, which power up but somehow have a faulty interface for programming.
2.) Something is fundamentally flawed with my programming setup and I¡¯m not seeing it.
Any advice on how to troubleshoot further? I¡¯m optimistic I¡¯m just overlooking something dumb I need to do for these to be read.
73,
Matt, N1ZYY
Matt Wagner