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Chapter 10:
Troubleshooting
General Considerations
Site Test
The most basic tool for troubleshooting is the Site Test at 50 feet range. (See
Chapter 4
for the details on how to do a Site Test).
If the Site Test fails at close range (50 feet), you have found the problem. The radio on either the Base Station or the RF Terminal
is defective. A Terminal may operate poorly at a distance of less than 10 feet from the Base due to high transmitter power. Make
sure to Site Test at least at 50 ft. range.
If you have multiple terminals and multiple Base Stations, after site test failure, you can determine if the failure is with the Ter-
minal or the Base by substitution. If you have only one Terminal and Base, you have no way of knowing which has failed; you
must call us and get an RMA for both units to be checked out at the factory in Santa Cruz, California.
If the Site Test passes, there is nothing wrong with the radios.
Changing the Battery
For RF Terminals, the most frequent cause of problems is a low battery that has either been ignored or undetected. The real test
for the battery is to remove battery from a working unit and place it into a suspect unit.
Most of the time the battery becomes the problem as a result of:
The operator ignores the
Low Batteries
message and doesn’t finish up the transaction and immediately charge the battery. If
you turn the unit off and turn it on again, the battery may have had time to “almost” recover. Unfortunately they will have so lit-
tle reserve power that they will likely operate just long enough to produce some very screwy behavior on the RF Terminal. In-
termittent laser beams, continuous beeping, a blank screen, etc. are just a few of the symptoms that can be exhibited.
Problems with a new installation:
“
Waiting for Base to Acknowledge
” is a normal message, generated when you first try to establish radio contact. If your Terminal
continues to generate this message and it ultimately results in a "
Transmission Failed"
message, your radios are not communicating.
Be sure they’re on the same channel and try again. If you have multiple terminals, try another terminal. If the 2
nd
terminal also fails on
the same channel, the base station is bad. If the 2
nd
terminal passes the Site Test, the first terminal is bad.
If the Terminal displays the “
Waiting on Host Prompt
” message, the host program is not communicating with the Base Station.
There is no radio problem, because the Base Station has already acknowledged the Terminal’s Sign In. The Terminal is waiting on the
Host to tell it to do something. Try the demo program; if it works the problem is your program.
If using the Active X program with XP, be sure "connection pooling" is disabled.
If the demo program fails, the problem is one of the following:
The cable between the Base Station and host computer is bad. Try the test with extension cables removed.
The host COM port is bad or assigned to another device driver installed. Try another COM port or try another computer.
RARELY!!! The RS232 chip on the Base Station is bad.
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