Review of the Feidaxin FDC-460A ham radio

I heard some decent reviews about the Feidaxin brand of ham radios. These have been what we call 'Rice Box' Radios. They hail from parts of Asia and with that come at a very cheap price. On average a single band radio will sport about $60 USD or so. Being that they are damn cheap makes them appealing, but are you getting what you pay for?



From my experience with my FDC-460A its not completely horrible. For $60 I cant complain much.

The good:
Inexpensive.
Works great as a spare radio
Just fine for a simple radio that does repeater, CTCSS, and DCS.
Unlocked in the entire 400-460MHz band, use as FRS/GMRS (or other) Radio.
Decent solid design, I wouldnt beat it up but its not a bad radio.
Ni-MH Cells, easy to upgrade or replace if you are handy with a soldering iron.
Full 5 Watt on all frequencies. Or 1 watt in low power.
Option for programming cable for the PC and software to program the memory channels.
99 memory banks.
Can be put in "Stupid User Mode" which allows the user to cycle through the programmed. channels, like a regular 2-way radio.

The Bad:
No Alpha tags, you have to memorize your frequency list, unless you put it in "Dumb mode"
Scan speed is slow, even for an HT.
Digital Squelch.
The charge dock mashes in the bottom row of buttons on the radio, its hard to dock.
Battery charge time isnt the best.
They have a male SMA connector on the radio, which is weird.
User manual is in horrible engrish, but with some common sense its not hard to figure out.
Programming software is usable but in engrish.
Some people report having defects.
Doesnt operate the best in extreme cold, so dont keep it in the car during winter.
Programming the radio by hand is a pain in the ass, but isnt that said for all HTs?
When using a headset you cant use the PTT button on the radio, you must use the PTT on the headset... thats just weird too.
No VOX Support (I dont like VOX anyways).

General
I use mine on both ham radio bands, local security (in hindsight I should have gotten the 410-470Mhz model), FRS/GMRS, and anything else in between. The squelch control is menu driven, you may not like it. I dont mind so much but being I have been an HT and Scanner user for many years I am very accustomed to manually adjusting my squelch while in the field. The 1W / 5W power selection does seem like a small drawback especially for battery consumption, but this is common on even expensive radios. I like having a Low-Medium-High setting. The fact that it can do full 5W (closer to 4W on the upper band) is nice though. I can pop on the FRS/GMRS bands at 5 Watt. Yes, I know it is not legal to operate over 0.5W on FRS Bands. Blow me, I dont give a rats ass. When an emergency arises I can hand out a small fleet of FRS radios and use this FDC-460 as a repeater node (with some additional hardware). I have seen report of some people making low-cost, low-power mobile/portable repeaters out of these lil' buggers. This is also great for an inexpensive APRS Radio

If you just need a spare radio to hand to the kids, wife, or friend to keep in contact via simplex, or have a friend that wants to get into the hobby and you dont mind being control operator for them, this isnt a bad choice. I keep this as a backup and when I am out hand it to my lil' lady Bunnie, or even my other friends when we want to go shopping and I want to fuck off. I see crappy FRS/GMRS radios that cost just as much and dont offer the features this thing has.

It also has full PL tone (CTCSS) and DCS Support which is also used on many security fleet radios, FRS/GMRS, and Ham Radio Repeaters. Unfortunately the lack of Alpha Tags you need to memorize what all your frequencies belong to. There is a mode you can boot the radio in by holding the [F] key and turning on the radio which puts it into what I call "Dumb mode". It will list each programmed frequency as a number in a list, rather the frequency. It also locks out the ability to manually tune in a frequency, play with the offset, PL/DCS, and other settings. This way you can set it up, hand it to an inexperienced user and just tell them "Tune to channel 4" or whatever...

I would definitely recommend getting the programming cable. Programming any HT for me is a major time consuming pain in the ass. Unfortunately the software is in Engrish as well. For me it wasnt hard to get working at all, but I am an experienced hacker and technophile. I have noticed that most Hams have as much computer skill as a 4 year old child on drugs, or worse. Just make sure you get the right programming cable, if you are using XP, go for the USB one. Dont even ask for OSX or Linux support! I wouldnt consider this a major purchase factor though.

Some minor quirks
For some odd reason they put a male SMA connector on the radio. Typically you see the male connectors on the Rubber Duck Antenna or Coax. A female SMA coupler fixes this though.

(Yes, it came with a very nice antenna)

Another small quirk I noticed is that if you use a headset you cant use the PTT on the radio. It will transmit but no audio will travel from the HT. You must use the PTT on the headset. There is no VOX control, which I dont use anyway. I find that loud cars, alarms, and background noise tend to false-trigger most VOX controls since I am not a typical fat, lazy ham that hasnt seen his penis in years. I use my radio out in the field and I am very active in general, and this radio has done a pretty good job so far. For $60 shipped... I cant bitch.

The funk never ends

As many of you from BSoD have noticed the show has been canceled due to a severe lack of help from the community. I have been griping about it for quite some time with the honest hopes of my blunt honesty it would perk people into helping out. After all of the unreliable boasts of segments, a busy and moderately unstable social life, and proceeding health issues, I do not have the resources to maintain the show with just the help of Mustang alone. He has been on the edge of severe diabetes for quite some time and I do not want to put any more burden on him than his health and family already do. I have plenty of segment content myself, but this isnt going to be The Foxx Show, ever, despite the fact that 90% of the fans of BSoD think I am the main man behind it all. I will take credit in getting things started, taking off in the direction we have, and sustaining interesting content for all these years, but I will never be the viable dictator commanding people to come forward to help that people assume me to be.

Onto my own personal affairs. Scuba from the BSoD community sent me a Wyse S10 terminal. It sports a 300Mhz AMD Geoge CPU, DDR RAM, and a typical 44 pin IDE header. The hardware is very similar to the WebDT 366. I have been trying to work my magic on it but one thing has really been putting roadblocks in my way, and thats nazi-computing. Wyse designed the BIOS so it will boot from USB only if it contains a specific partition and disk image layout which is 100% proprietary to their hardware. This thing is just a small form factor computer with a crippling BIOS so they can make sure you keep crawling back to them for support.

With the custom USB Booting aside I popped my Compact Flash card from my WebDT 366 into the Wyse S10 with the aid of an IDE to CF adapter and 44 pin ribbon cable. Besides the fact that the Windows XP install had absolutely no drivers for the hardware and I couldnt log into it, the thing boot just fine as expected. I could easily deploy a Linux distro from another host computer then tailor it once its in the Wyse S10. There is also the option to do a Network Install of an OS using PXE NetBoot, that is something I havent tried before so I will give it a whirl when I get some spare time.

The WebDT 366 is coming along as well. I caught a great deal on some Memorex 8GB Traveldrives. They are old but as soon as I saw them they looked a wee bit bigger than a typical Compact Flash or Microdrive. I decided to roll the dice and use my technophile intuition and I got three of them for about $8 a piece. As soon as I got them I popped one open and my assumption was correct, 8GB Microdrives! I tossed one onto the WebDT 366 IDE bus and installed XP a little hastily. In my excitement I didnt pay much attention to the finer details of the install so right now its far from optimal, however the Microdrive is operating in UDMA mode 2, which is a max transfer speed of 33.3MB/sec compared to the Compact Flash cards PIO Mode 4 which is only 16.5MB/sec. Any attempt to force these cards to operate any faster using BIOS settings make the OS crash almost instantly. I know these speeds sound like a ball busting crawl but hey, this unit is durable!

Something else I found out while doing all of this work with Compact Flash and Microdrives. I thought I had fried my CF cards because they wouldnt boot an OS anymore. Assuming I blew out some of the NAND gates in the MBR section of the cards, which is why I got the microdrives. After my second install of XP on one of the cards which I used for a different device I came across the same issue I had with the CF cards! Using a simple linux command recommended to me by another BSoD'er, Modat7, I did a full binary wipe of the drive inside of a linux virtual machine with the drive on a USB adapter. After the process was done I went back to work installing the OS on the native host hardware and dont'cha know it, it worked flawlessly. Unfortunately I cant exactly replicate the cause of this problem, or explain why it happens, but now I know how to identify and fix it.

With a little more time and patience I should have the DT366 in a field ready test phase. Ive unbricked my Zipit Z2, and the WebTV 2 RM4100 is running different OS flavors just nicely. The RM4100 needs a peck more work with some hardware hacks though. I have also reworked my Nokia n800 with a more stable and useful configuration for field work. With the help of Metatron I was able to get my WiSpy hooked up but the USB is so unstable its pretty much worthless as a 2.4Ghz spectrum analyzer. I will try out the WebDT soon but I need to focus on the OS and fine tune it to squeeze every bit, byte, and nibble of resources out of it.

Over the holiday I rebuilt the battery pack for a Microsoft Pharos Bluetooth GPS which I am quite proud of. Its sporting an interchangeable Ni-MH 3-Cell pack.


I also built a TNC-x kit which is (hopefully) going to air on BSoD once we kick back into production. I had to do some very minor modification to the serial port hookup which involved having to make a DIP socket Piggyback to get the leads out to the connector. I didnt have enough room to hook into the onboard DB-9 serial port and I didnt want to solder leads onto the PCB itself. I felt that it could be a cause for failure in the future.



In time all of these devices will be modular with one another adding onto their capabilities. They will combine to make different types of terminals, scanners, desktops, and portable mobile mayhem generators.

WebTV 2 Update

My larger compact flash cards can no longer sustain a full feature Windows XP OS, so I have fallen back to linux. There is nothing wrong with this, but linux on the RM4100 isnt new. The CoreBoot BIOS crew has been working on a replacement BIOS, which should kick my BIOS's ass, since they know what they are doing and I am just using blunt tools to carve away at something I dont fully understand. Dot get me wrong, I know how a BIOS works, but fucked if I can write one from source.

I have Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, and Debain on separate CF cards. Full debain doesnt run too well, a bit too bloated. If you are new to linux and want it on the webTV 2 RM4100 I dont suggest you start with Debian. There is some work needed to be done in order to get the TV Output working though. If you are not linux savvy then I dont know what to say. It will work, but if you arent wise with linux, just try and stick with the other prebuilt flavors.

All hardware in the RM4100 is supported under linux, except native TV output, but that can be fixed with the proper packages. No BIOS level support yet.

Save Now

You can check out the SeaBIOS here: http://www.coreboot.org/SeaBIOS
The main issue here is how do you flash the BIOS? Whelp, im working on a softmod method as well. Its based off the old BootROM Video Test Exploit, but do not expect me to make this work. This is not an area I am familiar with, then again, thats why I enjoy this.

Faceplant of sucksess

I promised I would post more often, and I am a man of my word. Although I prefer to spend my spare time hacking, modding, soldering, and tearing away at the inner soul of machines, my current situation has lent me a few minutes to update. Per previous posts and personality traits, I like to post about something thats worth a damn.

Like I mention over and over and over again, the Webb TV 2 RM4100 hacking is not dead. Not in the least, no way, no how. Time and the lack of it... anyways. Recently I pulled it out to confirm some of my BIOS hacking suspicions and try to make some progress. I have managed to podge together an AMI BIOS thats damn compatible with this RM4100. Only MAJOR BIOS level issues is that the machine cant restart itself. I suspect its an ACPI issue, but this is fixed once an OS is installed. Wait... what?! You got an OS installed?! HOW! WHICH ONE!

[ WebTV 2 RM4100 installing Windows XP SP2 - Click image to link to my picasa page ]

Yes this is my livingroom, which has suffered from a severe bulimic episode from my lab. Now to the fine details:

Using Compact Flash cards which is already onboard, native Primary Master and bootable on the RM4100, and and IDE mod, I hooked in a regular optical drive which has been powered off a separate PSU for now. The RM4100 does in fact have pads for an IDE header for the Secondary IDE chain, and even a spot for a molex power connector. I just havent gotten around to activating it. You need to add a few through hole electrolytic capacitors to get the onboard molex working. I have it set up and going on another RM4100 I have. Granted pre-install of Windows XP with SP2 was painful being that the BIOS had forced the Compact Flash card into a very slow DMA Mode 2 which is a crippling 33MB/s. After post install and I had configured Win XP with some minor tweaks, the typical action of turning off themes, indexing, restore points, and useless animations, then proceeded to install the device drivers... it ran pretty god damn smooth! I was able to get the CF card into UDMA Mode 4 which is twice the transfer speed. Performance wise I wasnt impressed, but I was surprised at how smooth it was, despite how the CF card was bottlenecking the OS Speed.

Performance does not compare to your typical PC today, but for what its worth this thing was running very nice, smooth, I couldnt complain. Except the Compact Flash cards were not in the best shape and it crapped out on me over and over again. I was able to test a few theories.

• IR keyboard/Remote is hooked to a microcontroller on the PS/2 bus. You cant put PS/2 back in, but you can use the IR keyboard if you remap the keys using some extra software. The keyboard doesnt have a full set of needed keys (Like the F-Keys and Esc)
  
• The BIOS can not get the TV-Out working natively. VGA is needed to configure the BIOS
  
• I was not able to get the Intel Extended Graphics to detect a TV display, chances being there is no load balance for the transmission lines that are used to detect displays. I can not force TV out with the default drivers. The CF Card shit out before I could install an application that will force TV output, but my assumption is that if we force it, it will work, and the registers for TV out in the IEGD (Intel Extend Graphics Driver) will TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) letting the BIOS do TV out, granted you have the BIOS CMOS Battery in place to keep all the registers set. When I plugged in a display, it did detect a carrier sync signal, which means it IS spitting an output to the TV-Out!
  
• Sound is in fact muted on the hardware level. There are some specific registers that need to be set to desaturate a transistor that keeps the sound card in a hardware based mute mode. Drives are at full volume, but nothing comes out. Removal of transistor Q3002 on the board gets it working. Crude hardware hack but it works. I do not have the coding skills to set the proper registers on a driver level to unute via software, 3 seconds with my soldering iron is a lot easier for me
  

I made some decent progress, a lot of my assumptions were correct and my technical experience in internet appliances and embedded hacking hasnt failed me yet on this device. Unfortunately all of my Compact Flash cards are extremely unhealthy and do not provide a stable test environment for me. I have some parts on the way, so just stay patient with me and I will release as much as I can as often as I can. This device does show quite a bit of potential granted you know how to make the most out of your hardware.

WebDT 366, and beyond the stars.

Ive given up any hopes in hell to make a mating connector for my WebDT 366 IDE Flashrom Board, so I ripped out the 2mm pin header which is only half height. Surprisingly it was quite simple! Back breaking, tedious, and utterly mind-numbing, but I think many people can do it, granted they are comfortable with a soldering iron. Seeing how I had a busted IDE cable from previous attempts to get an IDE cable modded and working, I chose to solder the cable directly into the motherboard. Yeah... dont do that, major pain in the ass. You can easily install a normal height 2mm header so you can use a regular IDE cable. From there you can use almost any style IDE drive you want to use. ALMOST ANY IDE DRIVE!

The WebDT 366 IDE bus is limited to 3.3V drives, and no more than 350mA or so. I havent tested it exactly how much amperage it can handle. 300mA drives work fine, my CF cards are rated fr that, 500mA does not. Now we can "borrow" power from the USB port, but with my current direct-wire hookup, its not easy to disconnect the +3.3v lead from the board. After all, we dont want to directly hook something that can handle more voltage and amperage into the IDE +V line, now do we? NO! We do not! Of course the first thing that comes to mind is USB. Granted I think the USB on the WebDT is useless beyond text/mouse input, the dock does have some USB lines I will have a very unlikely chance of ever using. I can/will mod some of my IDE to CF afapters, and 44 pin to 1.8" IDE (aka iPod Drive) adapters so they directly take power off of the USB on the interna cradle connection, which leads to a 2mm pin header anyways. The mod will be pretty simple in general, granted you can grasp the general concept.


This is the general idea. Compact Flash drives work, but they are somewhat slow in PIO only modes. I used a 6GB microdrive that detected, but it drew 500mA (labeled on the drive itself) and I had major issues with what seemed to be random power brown-outs. Here is a stock install of XP Pro 2 with the themes pulled out, and some very minor optimizations. The OS still needs some work, but thats a matter of personal preference and wont really get into it.

Now for something kinda' cool. You may or may not know, I am into ham radio. Not the typical two fat fucks talking over a static repeater link about local news, weather, and bowel movements. There is a LOT more to the hobby. One of them being Slow Scan TV. Its is a method of encoding digital images into an analog signal and transmitting it over a radio carrier. Its like TV... but slower.. get it.. SLOW Scan TV (SSTV from herein).

SSTV was used on many space missions for imaging, and I am talking back in the 1960's. Technology has improved just a wee bit over the past few decades. Getting the hardware to get SSTV going isnt all too taxing in general. I loaded up MMHAMSOFT's SSTV software on my friend Ugster's WebDT, and on my laptop (for now, I dont have the right audio connectors) hooked into my Handheld Radios (HT Radio). One is a cheap $60 FD-460A 70Cm band (440Mhz) and the other is a Yaesu FT-60 dual band (google it). With some basic audio patch cables and software set up, we started sending some images.

The image is actually a macro shot of my eye using a Playstation 2 Eyetoy USB Webcam with drivers hacked to be used under windows, and a red LED for a backlight. The radio as stated is an FDC-460A

Why longer isnt always better.

I know I dont post often, I am sorry. I am not in the lifestyle of ending my adventures in the electronic wilderness with a post about it. I prefer to collect my thoughts and proceed with the next phase of progress. Which comes to mind, the RM4100 is not forgotten! It will be finish after I tie up some loose ends!

I have been fighting with my Web DT366 quite a bit, I enjoy this little fucker. Granted it has some handicaps when it comes to the USB, and inability to boot from onboard Compact Flash (herein referred to as CF) with the internal connector. This is what I have been up to

The one major crippling issue of the WebDT was its USB 1.1 to load an OS from, and the 512MB FlashROM Board. The USB 1.1 is totally useless to run a live OS distro, no matter how small it may be. Now I have tried and tried some more, using every tech trick inside my e-Hat to get a way t hook another drive to this bus so we can use a more enhanced OS. Im no looking for OSX or Vista, but something thats usable in general, and not so stripped down it barely does the task you want it to do, say... scan for wifi, map networks, control head for your home automation and A/V gear. This lil' buggar has alot of potential, but the lack of storage is a major Achelie's heel.

In essence this is a regular IDE bus, 44 pin header. But here is the catch, its half hight We cant plug into it with a regular connector, and I havent found one that could fit so far. Since my last post about the Web DT I have been corresponding with Molex, whom makes similar connectors. I thought I finally kicked the WebDT int the nuts and made it my subservient anime school-girl bitch. Molex was QUITE helpful for sending me countless samples oh pin headers to line up and get mated into this motherboard.

It turns out the motherboard uses a standard 44 pin ~ 2mm spacing on the PCB itself. This is a throughhole component, all the connectors I have are SMD, assuming the board was in fact - SMD - and here I am like a schmuck looking at this through-hole header. Sick of waiting, and with the essence of a hacker, I make due with what I have.

*I DO NOT RECOMMEND DOING THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE VERY GOOD SOLDERING SKILLS!! ~ YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!*

[PICS Will be added later]

I attempted to sand a 44 pin IDE Cable for laptops to be half height to fit over the connector. This failed because most of the pins did not make proper connection. This took a week of trial an error before it took a total nosedive into the utter end of total-fail! I cut the remaining connector off, which wasnt much by the time I was done by the end of the mod, to be left with a cable that had one working crimped 44 pin IDE end, and a nice length of ribbon cable.

I then spliced each wire, and then tinned them, prepping them to be soldered directly to the motherboard in the through-hole pads. Thing here is, however, there was already a connector in place. What I had done was *gently but firmly* clamp the board in place, then proceed to work. Using a typical 35W iron with decent tinned tip, I held it on the pad holding the pin, and with a pair tweezers (or other fine tipped tool for grabbing small tings) pulled the pin out. I pain painstakingly removed all 44 pins, then pulled the plastic layering off. No glue, it just popped right off with no issues. I cleaned up the remnant of solder that were in the through-holes with some cheap desolder braid. It was surprisingly easy! I didnt have a single issue with any of the through-hols at all. It was just very tedious and pain staking in my back and neck

The board is clearly marked Pin 1,2, 43, and 44 for reference, No Guesswork here! Always a plus! I prepped the IDE cable I destroyed, the header was gone from excessive sanding in shy hope of getting it to natively fit with the now missing connector. I pulled he wires apart a wee bit, spliced, and GENTLY pre-tinned them with solder. Sorry, no amazing pics there. Nothing too exciting to see, I got all the pins soldered in place as neatly as possible [Pics to come, next time I pull the DT apart].

Now here is the important part! The Web DT366 uses a through-hole 2mm pin header! It does NOT use a SMD or multilayer pin header. You can easily salvage or buy (or claim free sample) proper pin headers, and solder it in place, that is if you dont want to take the pain-mistaking long amount of back breaking work to get the IDE cable directly soldered in. I will order some proper headers from molex as soon as I can to mod my other DTs.

Now with any IDE cable or header mods done you will need mods done to the WebDT. This is one of many options. When I get the others completed (for friends) I will post results.

Now that we have a working IDE interface its time to get an OS installed. As previously stated in earlier posts, the WebDT can boot from USB Optical Drives, or USB Multboot. Now I have had more luck with the optical drives, but if you want to do the USB Multiboot method, by all means feel free to try. If you come into a 0x0000007b Blue Screen of Death Error, you have issues with the IDE Controller Drivers. Take nLite out for a date ad perhaps a nice movie and you will get lucky. Works for me. Still being you are installing whatever OS from USB 1.1, my case being XP Pro SP2 Corp', its going to take some time, so be patient. Of course there are some MAJOR optimizations to me made in the OS, and where to get proper OS drivers, but thats for another post.

Here are some critical findings about the IDE so far:

• Compact Flash (mine is 133x and says it supports IDE modes) only does PIO mode, which is VERY SLOW! It is comparable in speed to the onboard 512MB IDE FlashROM Board. Definitely not the fastest thing to be running an OS from,
  

• The IDE bus supplies a 3.3V line, with very low amperage. I have not measured (the amperage) it, but it gets into my next point.

• If you choose to use a Microdrive, although 44 pin to CF adapters exist, the WebDT IDE bus cant push out enough amperage to power the drive. It will detect, but encounter errors or IRQ conflicts (OS Dependant) during install. I am working on a fix for this, so you better brush up on your soldering skills!

• 1.8" IDE derives, or also known as 'iPod Hard Drives' or 'ZIF Hard Drives will give the same issue as microdrives, however...!
  

• The typical IDE chain runs at 5V, the 1.8" ZIF Drive runs at 3.3V. I had modified the adapter board replacing the onboard surface mount regulator with a bare wire (the small 4 pin black rectngle ting at the top of the board) allowing the WebDT 3.3V Rail to power the drive... again there is no way to get enough amperage to the HDD, and your OS will return an error. There is a fix for this that I will attempt. That is to snip the +V rail of the IDE pin on the male header of the drive adapter, and solder a wire to a known +5V source, perhaps some unused USB Bus ports un he WebDT 366 Dock. USB will give 5V at 500mA. More than enough to power the 1.8" HDD. The 5V though, not good... I will have to wire the 5V from USB into the onboard regulator, but disconnect the +V pin on the adapter header so we arent crossing the USB +5V line into the IDE +3.3V Line. Sounds hard, but it shouldnt be. Ill cut the physical pin on the header, remove it completely, then solder in the +5V needed that will be plugged into a very and utterly useless USB header on the bottom dock connection. As long as the new +5V line doesnt attach to the onboard IDE 3.3V rail, all will be well.
  

So far I have full non-nlite XP running from an 8GB x133 CF card with minimal tweaks.No Themes, running in classic mode, turned off Indexing, turned off Restore points. adjusted the Pagefile a bit, turns off all animations and graphical embellishments; although I did keep in Common tasks. Graphics, sound, touchpanel work, need to get my PCMCIA wifi card working,but thats the last on the list. I need to go and do tons of service patch updates and install my USB wifi cards, WiSpy, and other little doo-dats.... K-Melion, PUTTY, Kismet, inSSIDer, Channelizer, VLC, Winamp 2.7x, WinRar, nMap, audacity, Scanner Recorder... just to name a few.

I am not taking this Install too serious as I will be running nLite across this for a custom install in general, and I need to get better Penmount support, and the Button Agent working. Button Agent isnt exactly open and downloadable, so I need to get a copy...somewhere. Maybe a decent On Sceen Keyboard would cool, but I cant find any that dont blow. I have a bluetooth keyboard, perhaps, or maybe interface my Erickson Chat board into the unused serial port on the Motherbard... Or even a mini USB, I have a few of those. Would be nice to make a Chorded Keyboard wit Flexstrip sensor interface, but not I am going beyond the topic of this post.

Ill try and post more about my hobbies and general works more often, I promise.

WebTV RM4100 Update on the down-low

Turns out my suspicion of the Web TV's new BIOS Socket being the main cause for failure. I removed the socket and in the process it was utterly destroyed. I Soldered the original BIOS back in place and the unit is back to its regular function. I lost my two other programmed chips, but no worries, I have a few spares. I'm pretty sure the BIOS I am working on will be what we need to boot the unit as a PC, with a few missing features, but I think the OS and a little iron time will fix those.

So YAY! The WebTV 2 is back to life!