Messages

1

General discussion forum / Re: FT8900 and proper settings

« on: 2019-03-11, 04:36:00 »

Been awhile since my previous post on this but I've done a lot of tinkering with the screen flickering and TX/RX dropping when remoting the FT-8900.  Hope this follow-up helps anyone else trying to use the FT8900 from afar.

I have numerous pairs of RRC1258MkIIs units and tried both hardware v7 units and v5 units.
Same results, the screen flickers and the TX drops, but only for the duration of the flicker.
All units are running 2.90 firmware.

Other radios (TS-480 & FT-857) across the very same VPN don't exhibit any appreciable problems but there are other posts discussing the FT-8900 screen flicker so it's gotta be something specific about that model of radio. My guess is the head and body exchange data frequently and there's some watchdog timer (in either the radio body's CPU or the control head micro) kicking in when it does not see the data for more than a few tens of milliseconds.

All that said when the radio and control units are plugged into the same Ethernet switch (or even on the same LAN anywhere in the building) there are no problems, so the FT-8900 must be very unforgiving when the latency between the heard and body increases beyond a certain level.

After a lot of experimenting I managed to minimise (but not eliminate) the problem by moving that particular radio/control RRC pair to a second tunnel connection (3G on one end, ADSL2+ on the other) and then going to the advanced section of both the radio and control units and setting the UDP cmd min-data-size to 50. Putting the units on the secondary connections alone helped a little but increasing the minimum UDP packet size seems to help a lot. I also set the radio side's RTP tx mode to Squelch and the control side RTP tx mode to Normal. The flickers and TX dropouts have gone from every few seconds to one or two every couple of minutes or so. The "screen blank or dark" duration is now very short, as in blink and you'll miss it. So it's not a fix, but the problem is almost negligible for casual repeater chatter.

73,
Pat

2

General discussion forum / FT8900 screen flicker as well as TX & RX dropouts?

« on: 2018-11-22, 03:20:15 »

First of all I have several pairs of the 1258MKIIs units and I cannot say enough good things about them. That said I recently reconfigured a pair of units to remote a Yaesu FT-8900 and I'm finding the receive cuts out in symphony with screen flickers as does the TX audio and carrier. I have a Kenwood TS-480 as well as a Yaesu FT-857 remoted between the same two locations and do not find any significant problems, but the FT-8900 seems to be a bit problematic. Is it possible the 8900 control head & radio body communicate non-stop (at the known 19,200kbps data rate) and is less tolerant to latency? I only ask because the other two radios appear to perform flawlessly across the same two sites. I use an IPSec tunnel between sites so NAT is not an issue, and the routers are enterprise class so there are no appreciable delays created by them. The 8900 radio & units work flawlessly when on the same LAN, but across the tunnel the performance has intermittent dropouts ranging from every second to every several seconds.

The question: Are most users having the same observations and the 8900 is not the best choice for the application or am I missing something? The units are both V7 hardware builds and running 2.90 firmware.

If indeed the FT-8900 does not readily lend itself to remote use I can switch to another FT-857 or perhaps an Icom ID-2820 but before giving up I thought it worthwhile to ask the question.

Any experience or advice would be most welcome.

Thanks for reading!

Pat, VE3PMK

3

General discussion forum / Occasional LOUD speaker pop on control head power off

« on: 2016-11-22, 02:48:17 »

I own three RRC1258MkII paired units remotely controlling a Kenwood TS480SAT, a Yaesu FT-857 and a Yaesu FT8900. Setup was very easy and they have all been working perfectly since day one. I cannot say enough good things about these devices, without exception they're the best product out there if you want the look and feel of having the distant radio sitting on the desk in front of you.

Unconditional praise aside, all three control heads have exhibited the same occasional two problems:

Rarely (as in very rarely) when the radio is turned on (via its control head) some portion of the LCD screen does not populate.

On the TD480 it's usually the LCD meter face (background scale, etc) but the arc/bar graph still functions. Turning off the rig and back on via the control head's power button always clears the problem.

On the FT857 sometimes the upper right corner voltage display only shows the last digit, and sometimes the label of the left vertical meter bar graph is missing.  Again, turning off the rig and back on via the control head's power button clears the problem.

On the FT8900 (again VERY rarely) a small section of the LCD won't fill in, but just as with the others, power cycling the radio via its power button on the control clears the anomaly.

This every now and then failure of the LCD to fully populate is a minor thing, it happens very rarely and is easily resolved usually with one power cycle of the radio via the power button on the control head. Sometimes I had to do this twice but one cycle usually fixes things. I've never had to cycle the DC power to the RRC units on either end.

The second problem is more troubling: Every now and then, and with much greater frequency than the LCD problem mentioned above. Approximately 10% of the time when I power off the radio (via its power button) there is a very loud speaker pop as the head shuts down. Loud enough to suspect sooner or later it may damage the speaker. I'm now using external speakers in all three configurations (okay - two of them must use one, but I've added one to the TS480 setup) just in case the pop causes the speaker coil to go open.

Anyone else experiencing this problem? I expect so as it's happens occasionally on all three setups of mine and that's across three different transceivers.

The question is whether or not this is a documented problem and is there a fix beyond installing clamping diodes across the speakers? All my units are running the latest firmware but they all still generate a loud pop on the speaker about 1 in every 10 powering off of the radios.

Any wisdom, advice or solutions offered would be greatly appreciated!

73,
Pat, VE3PMK