Kenwood TR-7950 Crashing Computer?

[M Taylor]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 07:39:30PM -0500, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Last week, after transmitting several times on a Kenwood TR-7950
> connected to my KPC-3 Plus and my (practically brand new) computer, my
> Red Hat Linux installation simply froze and crashed on me. The hard
> drive developed all sorts of never before seen (to me at least!) bad
> blocks and inode issues which e2fsck couldn't cure. I was left realizing
> I had no choice but to reinstall Red Hat 8. I was getting issues like
> the 'diff' program suddenly becoming a symlink pointing at 'cut'.

Disconnect and power down the radio, and boot the machine in single
user mode ('linux single initrd=' at the LILO prompt), and do a complete
file system check, 'e2fsck' of all the drives. If you are seeing errors
to the console or syslog (typically in /var/log/messages on RH) about
an 'Unrecoverable error hdx' where hdx is your harddrive in question (e.g.
hda, hdb) then you have a disk failure and you should contact your vendor.

If you feel up to it, while reinstalling, tell it to check for bad
blocks, and if it takes a *very* long time or has a lot of unrecoverable
errors (check virtual console 2,3,4 (Alt-Fx), not sure which), then contact
your computer vendor about a disk failure.

> Although an friend of mine thinks it is not possible, I'm wondering if
> transmitting with this model of Kenwood (which is about 20 years old, I
> would say) only about 1 foot from my computer and 3 feet from the
> antenna, caused the system to crash? Perhaps the antenna is simply too

My guess is that the radio itself is not causing the problem, and without
mentioning the effective radiated power output (W) from the radio/antenna
I am not certain, but I suspect it is not an EMC/EMI issue. Rule out a
disk failure before investigating a EMC / EM interference issue.

Good luck
ve1mct
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[Robert L Cochran]

Thanks a lot for the advice. These are Western Digital WD1200JB drives.
I have 2 running with software RAID1. I bought them last September and
have a hard time believing they will crash on me. Software error is much
more likely. But I'm so new to radio that I worried about the 45 watt
Kenwood zorching my machine.

I reinstalled Red Hat Linux and formatted the disks several days ago,
before posting this. I hadn't noticed any messages with the syntax
'unrecoverable error hdx' and the drives (still in a software RAID1
configuration) seem to be performing well as they always had up until
last week.

Another suspect on my list is my Ximian Evolution email client. I had
accumulated about 30,000 emails, maybe more, at the time of the crash
and when it did crash I was using Evolution. Maybe it was really
Evolution's fault?

73,

Bob Cochran
KB3JCM

[Robert L Cochran]

The TR-7930 runs at 25 watts HI and 5 watts LOW.

The TR-7950 runs at 45 watts HI and 5 watts LOW.

This is at 13.8 VDC with 50 ohms load.

Source:Kenwood 2m FM Transceiver Model TR-7950 TR-7930 Instruction
Manual, Specifications, p. 5.

You can adjust power output down to 5 watts.

My 7950 really makes my small computer monitor image jump with each
transmission (the red 'on air' light goes on. I moved a spare computer
plus the TNC plus the radio and antenna downstairs to isolate it from my
other equipment. It really gets my attention when my monitor image jumps
around on the screen each time I transmit.

My home is not a wood frame house -- it's an older concrete block one.

Again, I'm extremely new at all this -- a real beginner as a ham. So I'm
not sure what it all means.

Thanks!

73,

Bob Cochran
KB3JCM

On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 21:09, Riley Williams wrote:
> Hi Cranz.

>
> >> Last week, after transmitting several times on a Kenwood
> >> TR-7950 connected to my KPC-3 Plus and my (practically
> >> brand new) computer, my Red Hat Linux installation simply
> >> froze and crashed on me.
>

> > FWIW, I have a 7930 about 14 inches away from my Compaq
> > DeskPro running RH 8.0. No problems that I am aware of.
> >
> > Just another data point.
>
> To flesh out that data point, what power level do you run?
>
> Best wishes from Riley.
> ---
> * Nothing as pretty as a smile, nothing as ugly as a frown.
>
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