An hour ago, I wouldn't have suggested the title, but the further I get away from it the more I just set back and laugh.

Here's what happened.

At about noon today I was talking to a friend on my repeater, it was linked to Allstar.  I decided to switch to my simplex base.  When I did I had this annoying giddie-up tick tick tick sounds.  It sounded like packet lost, but was very rhythmic.  I couldn't figure out where it was coming from.

I checked the obvious, swapped cables, swapped URI's, tore down all the links, isolated just that one and used the iaxrpt client to see if I could start to take things out of the equation.  I replaced the switch that everything was connected too.  Still there.

Next I rolled back recent svn changes thinking it must have been in one of those.  Now the strange thing was that it was isolated to only one URI, and only the TX side of it.

I confirmed that with Echolink, IRLP echo reflector, ever way I could think of.  Now at this point, it was going on 2 hours of debug time.  Next I started pulling out features I had enabled.  All along trying to remember when I knew the last time was that it sounded good and what had changed.  I even went to the effort rebuilding the ALSA drivers.  Still the problem.  I was at a loss.  I was about to send a note asking if anyone else had ever seen this when I thought…. Hmm I wonder if it's the Transmitter.

I pressed its PTT and the sound was there, so I pulled all the cables attached to it and did it again… Yep, still there.  Powered it off and back on and everything was perfect again.  Hooked everything back up, rolled all my changes back in, rebooted and poof it came right up, not issues whatsoever.

Damn, just goes to show you… it's always the *simple* things…. But in this case it was the last thing I checked :(…

So, 4hrs of debug, and it was as simple as resetting the TX.  At some point, it had got into a strange state… You can bet I won't make the mistake again!

Alan