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Lectrosonics UCR411a changed blocks on me, A.I.?


T_will

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Hello group (in particular, Larry F)

 

Just got an RA number should be going out to Toronto this week for repairs...

 

Hot n humid week of shooting in LA. My sweat made its way into the on/off switch of my "bagged" UCR411a  rendering it unstable for the rest of the shoot ("powering down" but never shutting off, not making a solid open up "on" contact, not recognizing ext DC power etc) 

 

Day off today so I opened up the unit to see what kinda filth had gotten in there and maybe clean the contacts (long past the warranty, fyi)

 

Turns on and off now, recognizes ext power. However, it has gone from a block 21 to a block 20 unit. Fires up as Block 20 displaying all freqs available in block 20 (TV 21-25)

 

Unfortunately I don't have a Block 20 TX to test tx/rx.

 

If memory serves me correctly that block change occurred during the heat of battle.  "Shift" happens and the desperate wtf? dial in my Tx freq but to no avail.  Blinking status...check freq etc

 

I had back up units, so no harm no foul. 

 

Question:  What's going on under the hood that could possibly cause a block change like that?

 

Firmware: 4.1/ 4.0 

 

Many thanks,

 

Toby

 

 

 
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Hi Toby,

congratulations...

CRAP happened.

" What's going on under the hood that could possibly cause a block change like that? "

rhetorical question ??

lots, and lots of stuff --it is called firmware, and its in all sorts of modern electronics

what difference can it possibly make to you specifically what happened, bottom line it needs to be corrected.

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Hi Toby,

Conductive liquid inside an electronic device could do almost anything. Here's DT's guess and it is a guess, also known as a WAG.

 

--Wow... the power switch behavior makes sense to me, but the loss of memory block info is puzzling.  Somehow either the firmware believed that both memory checksums were bad... hey waitaminit... how's this for plausible: firmware attempts to read EEPROM but cannot read either copy of the data because of conductive liquid; firmware then attempts to reinitialize "corrupted" memory and somehow succeeds, even though the reads failed.  I checked that the EEPROM is just behind the power switch hole.

 

Fanatically,

-DT

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Mike,

 

Hardly rhetorical.  If I wasn't interested I wouldn't have queried.

 

Has this scenario ever presented itself to you and if so did you come understand the causal relationship that results in crap happening?

 

Thank you LarryF  for the reply.

 

Cheers

 

Toby

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" Has this scenario ever presented itself to you and if so did you come understand the causal relationship that results in crap happening? "

yes, and yes

 

OK, how about this: 

My Toyota Prius began to accelerate uncontrollably, and I could not turn it off, as I wore through the brakes and finally crashed.

OK, now my lawyer wants to know specifically and exactly what happened...

this is "The Great American Blame Game"...

 

remember the frequent issue PSC had with a new antenna distribution product last year?

that was a new product that kept having repeated failures , and while it has been resolved, I'm not sure that any one specific thing was found, so much as a number of improvements were made to components ...

in your issue,  CRAP happened, and it needs fixing.

Edited by studiomprd
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Mike, you may like over simplifying things, but other people find the inner workings of stuff interesting, even if it isn't pertinent to getting the job at hand done.  It's called curiosity, and it's still worth discussing.

 

Toby, I had one of my 411s change blocks on me too.  I don't remember the details of what happened, but one of the components had gone bad.  Lectro took care of me, and now I've forgotten what went bad.

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Hook, Line and Sinker...here we go.

 

I have absolute confidence in Lectrosonics otherwise I would be spending my cash elsewhere. Sales and service have always been beyond reproach.

 

With regards to blame? I do not hold any of the following parties responsible for the anomaly/ freak out of my receiver:  Production, The manufacturer, climate change, my baseball cap, the manufacturer of my baseball cap, Remote Audio, Petrol, IDX, Sanken or even you Senator.

 

It is MY responsibility to protect MY gear, thus the liability falls squarely on my shoulders.  This is 100% my problem. So don't project or transfer your litigious experiences, 'cause this cat aint looking for a freebie.  I break it, I bought it.

 

RE: Automobile analogy.  Not pertinent. Had, however, you said that your petrol fuelled Toyota had mysteriously starting demanding diesel on the instrument dash display- I'd get it, but you didn't, so I don't.

 

Yes some of us are still curious and thankfully so.  Glad to know I'm not completely jaded.

 

Toby

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For those that are curious, the block changing is not the true problem with the units; it is a symptom of some other failure. As DT pointed out above, one scenario is if the two checksums don't agree, the unit then "knows" it is broke and tries to go back to a default setting. If the memory is messed up (sweat on the memory pins perhaps) the unit can't even get back to the default values. Basically it is that something is really wrong with this unit and isn't just that it went to the wrong block. The wrong block display can be due to more than one type of failure.

Best Regards,
Larry Fisher
Lectrosonics

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" the block changing is not the true problem with the units; it is a symptom of some other failure "

in fact it has not really changed blocks, it just looks like it is on a different block on the display, and the unit is not operating properly on that block, either!

 

IOW: broken

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