Batboard

Guys,

Quick shot taken in the darkest room of the house I could find - is this the normal illumination pattern on an XTS2500i, or am I suffering from dead LED's? I took the radio apart, and cannot see any physical damage to the LED's, or the traces on the PCB...

Looks like you have a dead LED in the upper-left corner for sure and possibly some dead ones by the directional keypad thing but it's hard to tell.

Pat

I got a 2500i from Panter w/ the exact same problem. It's not the flex cable i bought a brand new one from MOTO and my keypad still looks like that. It has to bed the LED's are bad.

That's what I thought. He has replacement C04 housings right now, but I still can't manage to justify $220 just for a housing...

yea i'm on the fence about getting one of those too. I asked him how many he had and he told me 1000+ so i think they'll be around for awhile

Looks like the top left, and the second one down on the right.

If you've got skillz, you can easily replace the tiny LEDs that are on the board. They sell them on eBay all day long. If you feel funky, you can replace them all with a different color, such as blue, red, or white (or all three).

Is the "I" rating lost as soon as you open the case?
David

dsheli wrote:Is the "I" rating lost as soon as you open the case?
David

Yep, along with the intrinsically safe rating. The only way a radio is officially rated intrinsically-safe and/or submersible is if you buy the radio new from Motorola, always have it repaired by Motorola or a shop with FM certification and the capability to test the submersability, keep full documentation on the repairs to each radio, and have the radio PMed as the manufacturer dictates.

Be careful opening the case. The "IS" series have a different latch (at least the jedi series did) Once you pop it open it breaks the latches and they dont go back in.

Fowler

Those LED's almost never go bad. At least I've yet to see one out for that radio.

It almost sounds like you have too little current being drawn by the "led" lighting circuit. Which means your battery is not connected good enough, your grounding is corroded, or possibly you have a blown resistor in the diplay light generation circuit.

I suggest you put up with it or send it in to a repair facility. If the radio is young enough you might even get a free repair from Motorola, a 2-year warranty comes standard with that unit.

All you have to do if your not worried about the i rating is change out the M3 keypad circut board.
Model # 0104026J98 ASSEMBLY KEYPAD BOARD M3 $32.55

I don't know where you take your radio but it would make me feel much better knowing my $2500 dollar radio is protected from the environments. I personally would not loose the "I" or "R" rating of that radio. All it takes is one structure fire for that radio to get wet and your "F'ed"
David

Guys,

Sorry for taking so long to get back to your responses - the forum was not notifying me of the replies!

It's a Panter88 $500 special, so I have no worries about 'invalidating' the 'I' spec - it never had it to begin with!

I'm going to check up on that part & see if Jeff can get it for me...

(This is my knock-around VHF radio - I take much more intense care of my 5000's)

Update:

I got the $32 keypad board from Jeff, and that cured the problem 100%!

I now have full symmetric backlighting, and the keyboard has a nice, crisp, 'click' when I push the buttons!