[DSP-10] Moth balled DSP-10 has some troubles

[Don AE5K]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the reply and suggestions.  Let me try to respond to your 
comments and questions:

No, the Dell 610 Latitude laptop does not have floppy, just CD. One 
reason for picking it was the real serial port on it besides speed and 
other usefulness.

Yes, I have other computers, and one laptop with floppy.  An old (very 
old Toshiba) that I originally first used with the DSP-10. I think I 
might want to go back to this and see if I have the same problems or 
not.  That might give a clue at least.

Nearly all my computers are dual boot between some version of Windows 
(Win95, Win98se, Win2k, WinXP, WinVista, Win7) and Linux (Debian, most 
are ver 7.0 Wheezy and kept up to date). I use Linux 99.9% of the time 
and only use Windows when no other choice for some applications.  (Every 
time I boot into Windows I have to wait for a long time for my antivirus 
program and Windows to do their updates due to long time non-use!)

What I am booting up to is DOS (MSDOS 6), not any Windows.  It does have 
access to both drive A: (ramdisk) and also drive C: on the hard drive. 
Windows is not booted or operating.  I used this several years ago and 
everything seemed to be working OK then. I might add that this is the 
first time I've tried to measure output power, and only had one 5-mile 
path SSB contact as mobile on 2 meters with it, so it is conceivable 
that the strange power output problem could have been present from the 
beginning.  I've never had the booting/loading problem before, however.

Not sure if the BIOS allows booting from USB, I would tend to doubt it 
on the Dell. Haven't looked lately at the options in BIOS, but I do not 
recall seeing that possibility.

Everything appears normal when DSP-10 is running. Screen scrolls, clock 
updates, frequency and band changes normal, waterfall trace of signal, 
audio level normal.  I've tried quite a few of the keyboard commands 
(ver. 3.80 w-sheet summary) and most worked, a couple I could not get to 
work (or I misunderstood them).  The keyboard works for sending CW.  It 
is apparently receiving OK with just in shack tests from a little marker 
generator.  It worked OK a year ago in receiving the signals from a 1296 
beacon close up, but has never been tried at any good distance.

Yes, this was a TAPR kit with the original AD module, the name EZKIT 
lite 2181 sounds like the one.

I might add, on the boot up problem: there have been several instances 
where the firmware did not download to the 2181 -- one case it just sat 
there and no action on the screen, another case it appeared to dump to 
the screen the hex numbers that it was supposed to download.  
Additionally, when calling upon UHFA 1 to load the program into the PC, 
it has stalled there several times. Other times, it goes thru both loads 
smoothly and the screen lights up with the normal display.

As I said above, I think my next move tomorrow is to try everything with 
the older Toshiba laptop with the software on floppy which worked fine 
before.  I'll post to the reflector the results.

Don AE5K


On 03/28/2013 08:20 PM, kd7ts wrote:
> Hi Don,
>
> Not familiar with the Dell 610, does it have a floppy drive ?
>
> Do you have a machine with a floppy drive and serial port you can use 
> for trouble shooting ?
>
> I have installed dual boot on my laptops that allows booting DR DOS or 
> W98. Really old WIN but useful occasionally.
>
> If troubleshooting is the issue, just run in a box under whatever WIN 
> is installed, up to XP. Don't know what 7 and 8 do, but up to XP it 
> works, but has really crappy timing. CW modes don't work properly, 
> maybe other things, but it should get you into troubleshooting only 
> one thing at a time. If it is slow into transmit or back to receive, 
> this might be normal under a WIN dos box. Oh, yeah, almost forgot 
> about this, with WIN. You will need to get a file from KA7EXM named 
> UHF3_33X.EXE that deals with serial port timing under WIN.
>
> http://www.ka7exm.net/dsp10/uhf3_33x.zip
>
> Read the page this from for more info ...
>
> http://www.ka7exm.net/dsp10/
>
> If you have lots of time and a strong will, you might try Dosbox under 
> Linux. This works quite well, but would not be my first choice with an 
> unknown problem. Maybe you know about Puppy Linux. It will run from a 
> bootable CD, and is about the easiest way to get LINUX running.
>
> The CD-R boot sounds like a neat idea. My machines don't support that 
> in the BIOS, others do, but not my laptops.
>
> Does your BIOS support booting from USB ? Just an odd thought.
>
> ------
>
> When the DSP-10 is running, does everything appear normal ? screen 
> scrolls up screen clock updates, you can change frequency and audio 
> level ?
>
> Was this a TAPR kit ?  (just trying to guess the vintage) KK7P 
> interface with ADSP-2185 ? or maybe has a EZKIT lite 2181.
>
> Sorry for having more questions than answers, but I hope this is useful.
>
> 73 Mike KD7TS