Look what I found…
I picked up a used Alinco DR-135 several months ago. I had decided to replace the DR-235 on the 9600 baud digi with a 2m radio. I have had good luck with the single band Alinco’s and making them work on 9600, so I asked a friend who hits all the hamfests in the PNW to keep an eye out. This summer he came across one, got the guy to drop the price $25 and bought it for me. (Note: I was on the phone with Lynn at the time and had already told him to pay the man his asking price. But paying the asking price goes against Lynn’s moral code or something)
Anyhow, fast forward to a couple week ago and I finally tried hooking it up. Everything seem to work on the radio, I was able to get into a couple local repeaters and people told me my signal sounded fine. So I hooked up the radio to the PK96 and proceeded to make sure it was decoding packets before attempting to set the deviation. This is where everything went off the rails. Nothing I did would make the TNC decode anything, I could hear the packets and I knew the radio was configured correctly, but no go. I finally broke down and put a scope on the output and discovered the reason the TNC wasn’t decoding anything was pretty simple. There was nothing there to decode.
At this point I’m scratching my head and set the whole mess aside for a week. I would come into my office, look at it and move on to something else. Then I got bored during a meeting at work, pulled down the manual for the radio and decided to double check I wasn’t missing something stupid. That is when I remembered something. These radios have an optional internal TNC you can buy, a EJ-41u.
I sent an e-mail to Lynn, asking if he remembered the guy mentioning the radio having the optional TNC. Lynn said he didn’t remember the guy mentioning it and would have been surprised if it had one, since he could have asked for more money.
And that brings us up to this evening. I got a wild hair and decided to pull the radio apart and just look. Four screws and the bottom came off the radio and there was the EJ-41u and the source of my problems. I had decided to remove the tnc, if I found one installed. The manual states that the KISS mode is ‘not supported’ and I pretty much only want to run in KISS mode now. So out came the problem TNC and I put the radio back together. I hooked it up and wow! I can decode packets now. I’ll check the deviation this weekend and hopefully finish making the replacement 9600 digipeater work. I just wish I could figure out the magic sauce for getting ax25 installed on linux boxes. I have done it three times now and each time requires poking at it for a couple days. I’ve tried to re-create exactly what I did to finally make it work, but every time requires poking.