No Display on Xeigu G90

Tonight I powered on the G90 and the display was blank with only a clicking sound from the speaker.

After checking the obvious power off the PSU and disconnect all the cables and reconnect , still no display on power on. The next task was to see if the head unit was truly dead, I fired up a terminal program and attempted to upload new firmware. 

I was using OSX and there are no really good terminal program for OSX these days at first on first look, but it proved that the display was able to be communicated with.

Time to update the firmware on the head and main unit.

On OSX this is well a pain to be honest, I had to use Parallels with a windows 10 VM and the Xeigu supplied unloader. Its going to be on of those night, windows in the first instance did not want to play at all, with the VM just cycling, brilliant just what I needed, the windows VM had not been started for a while so I guess it was the dreaded windows update thing doing what it does best .  This reminded me of why exactly I could never ever use Windows.  I gave up with windows and turned my attention to OSX, I located a nice serial program Called Serial that had 1K xmodem transfer.

https://decisivetactics.com/products/serial/

I used this and it worked great, re-flashed the firmware and the G90 burst into life. I was back and the first station worked was K4YT on 10mhz ;-) ok you have to buy the software for continued use but its a great alternative to using Windows.

Root Cause

The issue stems from using the serial adapter from a bad usb hub, the G90 was thinking on restart that the boot sequence was interrupted and sent bad characters that locks up the head unit. The fix is to re-flash the heads firmware and your good to go.  What I do now is disconnect the comms connector from the G90 head when its not in use and before a power down, or attach the serial cable direct to the machine and no further problems.

G4LCH