My controller acts erratically. What's wrong?

Be sure that you've connected both grounds to the power supply. They both need to get there - directly. Check for high electrical noise at the site, such as from heavy-duty motors or solenoids. Be sure that the power to the controller is stable - ac power at repeater sites can be very poor. Make sure that all ICs and connectors are firmly seated. Check that the supply voltage is within tolerance. Measure e it with the transmitter on.

The probability of a defective IC, unless damaged by lightning or static electricity, is very low. Always suspect other causes before concluding that an IC is defective.

The controller doesn't mute DTMF and doesn't decode any commands.

Check DIP switch 3 - this selects the command receiver COS logic sense. If you don't have a command receiver, switch 3 should be ON. If not, the controller thinks that the command receiver is active, and the touch-tone decoder is monitoring the command receiver audio input, not the repeater receiver.

DTMF doesn't always decode. Why not?

The dynamic range of the touch-tone decoder is very wide, so that if the receiver audio to the controller is between a few hundred millivolts and 2.5 volts p-p, it should decode. But some mobile and portable rigs transmit tone levels very hot, which causes clipping of the tones in the user's transmitter. If the level is hot enough to distort, the only solution is to reduce the tone level in the user's rig so that it transmits clean touch-tone. Other possibilities are non-flat frequency response somewhere between the user's transmitter and the controller, which causes the two tones of the touch-tone to be greatly different in level.

There are several other things to check. If you have a control receiver, be sure that its squelch isn't opening when you don't suspect it is. Perhaps someone is calling the repeater on the phone, grabbing the touch-tone decoder. Be careful about who you give out your repeater number to.

The patch won't dial the phone number - it just reeds back the number and beeps.

Don't forget that you need to click your mike during the pause to initiate dialing, unless you select the Control Op mode 'Dial without click'.

Why won't the controller accept commands from the phone?

Don't forget to terminate all touch-tone commands over the phone with a #. The # tells the controller to evaluate the command - without it, it'll just sit there.

The logic outputs are open collector transistors. The transistor is either on, so that there's a path to ground, or it's an open circuit. To see a voltage level, you need to add a pull-up resistor to define the logic high when the transistor is off. It's very tricky to try to measure resistance of the transistor output with an ohmmeter - don't try it. Just connect a pull-up and look for a voltage.

When the controller hangs up, the phone company sometimes reverses the battery ('winks'), and this can be seen by the controller as a ring, so it picks up the phone again. Set the Phone Answer Delay timer longer than about 10 seconds. Just before the controller answers the phone, it looks back in time eight seconds to see if the phone was still ringing in that period. With a longer answer delay time, it will reject the 'wink' as a ring.

How do I change the Patch Hang-up code back to #?

Enter the Command Code Prefix Programming command with an 'empty' prefix, i.e. *5022 with nothing following. This tells the controller to look for a # for Hang-up.

Do I need to enter *0 to actually write programming information into E2PROM?

No. The *0 command applies only to the message editor, so use it to write an edited message, but nothing else.

What information is stored in the E2PROM?

Do I need to store a Macro Set whenever I make a change?

Only if you want changes in the Control Op setup or User Function / Remote Base setup to be stored for powerup, scheduler or manual macro set selection.