PCS-Electronics

My transmitter card stopped working the other day and I am not sure why. But want to rule out lightening or a power surge first.

We had a storm a couple of weeks ago that lead to a 10 second power outage. Afterwards I discovered I had no internet access on my main PC and my PC in my garage (that I have my card in). This surge blew the ethernet ports on the motherboard on both PCs and three ports on my router. I was able to fix this by using some PCI ethernet cards and replaced the router.

So we had another storm and now my transmitter does not work.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software to no avail. Sometimes this fixes Windows problems.

I'm trying to figure out if it's the card, USB port or a software issue.

Under hardware manager it appears the card is on USB port 0. It says the device is working.

Can someone direct me to the latest software? Maybe updating the software and drivers might work. Any other suggestions?

I am sorry but I think the lightning got it

Regards,
Marko

pcs wrote:I am sorry but I think the lightning got it

Regards,
Marko

Looks like if lightening struck my J-pole antenna, it would have fried my whole PC. But it could have just been a power surge like what fried my ethernet ports and my router.

I did some more troubleshotting.

First of all I ruled out the power supply. I unplugged the card from the four pin power supply connector and rebooted the computer and under Device manager the card is not showing up. So I think I am good there.

Second, the instructions I printed off from your website is showing the device as PCS USB (COM5).

I'm running XP SP3 by the way.

When I pull up Device manager on my computer it just calling it "USB Audio device" and does not show what COM port it's on beside it.

If I right click on properties of the card it says "Location 0 USB sound device". So does that mean it's on COM port 0?

Also the drivers it's showing are not from PCS but from Microsoft. Although I ran the program that installs the drivers from your website. Then connected the USB cable from the card to the motherboard.

I just want to rule out this card is on the correct COM port before I decide it's fried. How can I determine that?

Also when I run the CybermaxFM setup program it's supposed to ask me which COM port I want to use but it never promts me.

The sound card and com port are two separate devices on board PCIMAX.

Maybe the com port died and sound card survived, it is possible.

When a lightning strikes nearby things can "die" from several sources, one is mains, the other is induced current in any longish wire. So ethernet cable can act as an pickup antenna which is possibly why your router died. Another possible source is antenna on the roof, either hit directly or just "picking up charge" from the nearby strike and feeding it down to the card and the PC.


What exactly happened is hard to say, but your pcimax is probably fried.

The lightning does not have to hit the house, if its close enough it can do damage as well via induction and power surges via mains.

pcs wrote:The sound card and com port are two separate devices on board PCIMAX.

Maybe the com port died and sound card survived, it is possible.

When a lightning strikes nearby things can "die" from several sources, one is mains, the other is induced current in any longish wire. So ethernet cable can act as an pickup antenna which is possibly why your router died. Another possible source is antenna on the roof, either hit directly or just "picking up charge" from the nearby strike and feeding it down to the card and the PC.


What exactly happened is hard to say, but your pcimax is probably fried.

The lightning does not have to hit the house, if its close enough it can do damage as well via induction and power surges via mains.

The lightning strike does sound credible.

I realize I’m talking about two different occurrences but the night that my Ethernet ports and the 2 ports on my router died, I heard a lightning strike which sounded like it was within a kilometer of my house. Oddly enough the ports on my router that my PC in my den and my garage were pulled into are the ones that are now dead. The other two still work. About 10 years ago I had the exact same thing happen. These were different PCs and a non wireless router. Both Ethernet cards stopped working as well as two ports on the router. Same ports they were pulled into!

Lightening is weird. You would think it would fry the entire computer and the entire router. Not just an Ethernet port or certain ports on the router.

That same night lightning struck our plant and shut the plant down for two days. I work at a chemical plant which is controlled by a DCS Honeywell system. Long story short it blew about 20 cards in the communicator room out in the plant that talks to the DCS in the control room at US$ 40,000 a pop! Luckily I was off that night and did not have to deal with the chaos it created.

Two weeks later we got another storm which was when my transmitter card stopped working. Since it was running fine before the storm, the storm must have had something to do with it. I’m going to give it one last shot and try installing it into another PC and if it still doesn’t work I guess I’ll be ordering a new card.

Usefull stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cTdrtJl ... =endscreen