Hi guys,
Long (for the details) sad story, but interesting, I think.
To refresh your recollection, in early February I tentatively signed up to reverse engineer the map of settings in the Yaesu FT-60 memory, pending any surprises that made this a bigger task than I expected.
It wasn't, and I have it pretty well mapped out, not only the settings, but the banks and scan limit registers and a few other features of the radio, plus nonvolatile operating state, like mem vs vfo. I've also fixed a few bugs (skips are completely broken in the current code) and some other smaller ones.
I was making another pass through all the settings to make sure the map hadn't shifted around as I continued to code - loading saved image files, checking in the browser and diffs, etc.
I wanted to do a direct "nothing else different" diff for setting 11, CW WRT. I had started out in this project not doing that in all cases, sort of making a change and comparing to the previous image, rather than setting to A, setting to B, then diffing. Sort of dotting i's and crossing t's before declaring it done. So I took the file that I downloaded from the radio after setting CW WRT with the radio buttons a month or so ago. Uploaded to the radio with the idea of changing CW WRT to a different string with no other change, downloading and diffing. Upload finished, powered off/on ...
The backlight comes on. There's the usual beep sequence. Nothing else. No display. No audio, even with the squelch full open. Nothing else. Buttons don't beep. PTT doesn't light the xmit led.
Since I've put it in clone mode it a few hundred times now, and can do it without the benefit of the display, I tried several flavors of reset. Nope. There is the _different_ beep sequence you get when you power on with Moni pressed. I tried uploading my operational image. Nope. It's a brick. Tried removing and replacing the battery. Tried a different battery. Google shows a few things that sound like mine, but not with any solution.
So I figure it's two years old, out of warranty, and the several hundred uploads and downloads I've done over the past two months possibly constitute abuse. A new one is $160 with tax, HRO in town has a dozen in stock, and I need an HT. The HRO guys had never seen one like this.
Get it home, upload a normal operating image file, check out a few Tx/Rx with my wife on her HT, and it seems good to go.
So back to coding. Upload that same image file. Now I have two bricks. I thought about attaching the image file, but maybe disseminating it isn't a good idea. It's available if anyone really wants it.
I don't believe it was edited after downloading from the radio, but that was Feb 7, and I can't be positive about that at this point. Are there any telltales wrt that? It looks like it's just the radio bits with no header info, so I'm guessing not, but I could be missing something.
Sooooo..... - Any ideas about unbricking my radios? - Any ideas about how this file could brick an FT-60? - For the new one I'll try for warranty coverage, not much to lose.
- And the big one: I 'm not sure I want to keep doing this project. Worst case, I can buy a third FT-60 and get on with life. I will say say that I'll never upload _that_ file, maybe put CW WRT off limits for settings, but since I have no idea what could do this, I'm a little worried that it could happen at any time as I muck around in the settings.
If I can download from the radio and upload the same file and do this, that's a little scary.
I can afford a few $160 radios, but not without a little wincing. OTOH, I've probably downloaded 300-400 times, and uploaded the better part of 100, counting operational images unrelated to this development, and never had this happen before.
BTW, my cable is from RT Systems.
Any thoughts?
-dan