CSI model 154 Tone Pannel question...

[richyradio]

O.K, anybody out there w/ intimate experience with the CSI model 154 rptr controller? here's what's up....a friend of mine has one of these in service, but it won't take touch tone commands via radio (rear panel phone ok) well, I tell him, make sure level, twist and cos is right, blah, blah blah......checked out , says everything is fine...ok I say, pull the whole mess and deliver it to me...I get it, find there is no pullup resistor on the cos line so it's always low...aha I say, another walk in the park ....geez, my dog could have fixed that! so I add a pullup, cos very stable, works fine (the cos gates a 4066 to pass t-tones to the decoder chip) so, I add a pullup, and now everything works fine...whopee, took 2 minutes to fix.....so I putz around sending various commands, and all of a sudden it stops accepting tones( via rx input- rear telco always works)...Hmmm I say.....go through everything, long story short, perfect tones onto decoder (which show up fine on the display, by the way) and still no work...what I found was, if i hold pin 6 low on the micro (which is it's cos detect, the way it knows commands are coming from the rx and not rear phone input) it works fine-(sending tones via rx, that is) but, since i held 6 low, it thinks it's getting it via rear panel and it will not send confirmation tones or hold in tx mode (actually for me, I think that is a good thing!) my friend has two more of these and they all do the same thing........seems like the micro to me, but instinct tells me no....but most logic happens within this chip...everything external to it is correct...and by the way, no ,there's no rf getting into it don't want to spend $50.00 for a new micro just yet.....ps tried w/ active subsciber tone , without, differentpassword etc...nothing works.....pps I should mention, it wont even go into programming mode in case I was not clear

[Will]

We had some of those Tone Pannels a while ago. They were disabled for DTMF over the air and only PGMD thru the RS232 port.

Try to use the RS232 port and see if you can set it to the mode you need.

[richyradio]

let's see if I can reply today....having issues replying both at wotk and home (I hate when you write a long response and it gets trashed!) this panel has no '232 input....you just hook a pots phone to the rear just for the use of the touch tone pad....again, the decoder is accepting tones, converting them to BCD to be processed by micro....either by rear phone or radio....same 4 BCD lines no matter what...it's the fact that when the micro gets it's cos detect it refuses to process input.......

[commtek]

My experience with these panels is that they are total POS. To program them with DTMF, you have to send the digits manually and hold them for approximately 1 second to get the stupid thing to recognize it.

That's why we use only Communications Specialists or Zetron panels. The Comm Spec panel is the best bang for the buck. For ham use, the S-Com units are nice, too.

[richyradio]

...I'm laughing...I KNEW sooner or later I would get that reply! as for me, yeah, I think I would go with Zetron, etc...actually for my stuff, I build my own controllers- I let the radio do the pl/dpl encode / decode, but I build the cor, tail, timeout, audio gating...(and using external touch tone decoder cards......may sound like a kludge, but I build my repeaters as "theme rptrs- based on a time period - something like restoring cars, I guess... can be 'MSY era, Micor, etc....I like the old Monroe touch tone decoder cards if anybody remembers what they were....super high speed decoding- those things could decode 4 digits in 50 milliseconds! (remember CNN in the old days used to blast out a touch tone sequence before going to commercial- it was these cards that they used.....I'm real anal when it comes to freq. response too...(rpt must sound like simplex- audio response from dc to light, and I go into the exciter and widen that out too (so much for fcc type acceptance!) also I have a thing for reverse burst/ turn off code- drives alot of people nuts, but I love dead silence when I unkey...(think Zetron is the only controller that handles that......I'm beginning to agree w/ post above tht this came from factory this way, as it responds to all other commands, just not remote access......p.s. speaking of touch tone decoders, does anybody have a reliable favorite? basically, say,a card that will accept 1-4 seperate sequences and provide relay (or open collector) outputs?