Shows the word OFF on screen when PTT is pressed. In settings "TX" is set to on, what am I missing?
The manual is no use due to poor translation and general incompleteness.
Amateur Radio Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for amateur radio enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityShows the word OFF on screen when PTT is pressed. In settings "TX" is set to on, what am I missing?
The manual is no use due to poor translation and general incompleteness.
This indicates that you are attempting to transmit out of band. This is typically a symptom of having the wrong offset (+/-) programmed for that channel.
If you visit the Alinco FAQ page you will find this advice for similar models.
Glenn's answer here gave me the nudge I needed. Checking through parameters, I found #11 ... Offset ... 5.000 seemed default setting.
With Offset at 5.000 the transmitter was stopped because that would mean operating on an Out of Band frequency.
The anonymous OM who posted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCzJV3gPYQ did an admirable job of walking through initial programming, but everything I tried threw an "OFF" error. Simplex gave me full power out, but neither + nor - responded properly.
I painstakingly spooled down all the way from 5.000 to 0.600 and guess what. Yup. Just broke squelch on our repeater!
+
or -
offset symbols, and thought to look at what the auto-offset was set to... and it was something weird like 2.7MHz instead of 600kHz. Resetting that cleared everything up.
$\endgroup$
Dec 13, 2018 at 21:39
I just went through the exact same thing with my own new-to-me DJ-500T (second generation). After a day of poking around, I solved the problem through a hidden menu thanks to some useful posts at the Radio Reference Forums.
In my case, I was trying to transmit on UHF (70cm) at 452.5625 MHz, which is a Part 90 channel used for local emergency response. When I pressed the PTT button to transmit, the unit made five beeps in rapid succession and displayed "OFF" on the screen. This led me to believe that I had been administratively barred from transmitting, even though I could receive just fine. Changing the offset did not work, since a 5.000 MHz offset is normal for the 70cm band; 0.6 is normal for the 2m band.
A number of sites suggested that you needed a programming cable to unlock transmit, but weren't clear on how you would program the radio once you had the ERW-7 cable.
I finally solved the problem by changing the mode of the radio. The mode change function does not seem to be documented anywhere that I found except in a forum.
NOTE: This process functionally does a factory reset, erasing all stored channels.
To start, locate PF2 (the button with two squares on it directly under the PTT button) and "D" (lower right hand corner of the keypad).
My device was somehow set to Mode 02 (Mode 2). Switching it to Mode 1 removed my restrictions for transmitting on my desired frequency. There are 4 modes to choose from.
Apparently, they are:
MODE 1 (DJ-500TB) Tx & Rx: 136 - 174 / 400 - 480 Rx on FM radio frequencies
MODE 2 (DJ-500T) Tx: 144 - 148 / 420 - 450 Rx: 136 - 174 / 400 - 480 / FM radio frequencies
MODE 3 (DJ-500E) Tx & Rx: 144 - 146 / 430 - 440 Rx on FM radio frequencies
MODE 4 (Fully Open) TX & Rx: 136 - 174 / 400 - 523 Rx on FM radio frequencies