my experience with no transmit power and question on cause

[YL3AQI]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share my recent experience with the Hermes‑Lite 2 (HL2). I had been using my HL2 with Thetis for several months without any issues, and then suddenly one day it stopped working. The first symptom was that it no longer transmitted any power.

I began troubleshooting using the suggestions from the “No Transmit” page on GitHub (https://github.com/softerhardware/Hermes-Lite2/wiki/No-Transmit). The next day, however, I couldn’t even connect to the HL2 anymore. I found another guide that recommended shorting the CW and PTT pins to ground when applying DC power. After doing that, I was able to connect again and started measuring voltages according to the hardware documentation (https://github.com/softerhardware/Hermes-Lite2/wiki/Hardware).

To my surprise, all measurement points (for PA circuit in TX mode) showed zero volts up to DAC, and additional checks didn’t reveal any obvious hardware faults. Therefore, it was clear that this is not a PA issue. My conclusion was that the problem is not electrical but software‑related.

I installed Quisk and attempted a firmware upgrade, but I couldn’t get it to work—likely due to compatibility issues between Quisk, Python, and my Windows setup. Fortunately, SparkSDR was able to update the firmware successfully, and since then everything has been working normally again.

Overall, this turned out to be an interesting and educational challenge. I’m grateful to everyone who has shared information on GitHub and here in the Google Group.

I still would like to understand what caused the problem in the first place. My philosophy is simple: if something works, don’t touch it. I hadn’t changed any settings or configurations before the HL2 stopped working. However, the day after the failure I noticed that all my filter settings in Thetis had disappeared (Setup ->General ->OC Control -> HF -> N2ADR Filter). I’m wondering whether this small detail might help identify the root cause (why software crashed).

My setup:
HL2 (connected via WiFi)
Laptop with Windows 11
Thetis Version: 2.10.3.8 [build HL2 (MI0BOT)]

73!

Ivars YL3AQI

[Steve Haynal]

Hi Ivars,

I'm glad to hear you were able to recover your HL2. My guess is that somehow a software change corrupted either the HL2 firmware or settings eeprom. I haven't heard of your exact experience, but there have been cases where a static IP gets accidentally set. (The static IPs are stored in a separate eeprom from the FPGA eeprom.)

73,

Steve

kf7o