OK, it’s time for a little transparency here.

As some of you may have seen, after 4 years of only replacing the cords on HTX-252 microphones, I can now do the 212 and 242 as well. So I was replying to a few old emails asking folks if they still need to get one of those replaced. Well this is a response I received from one of those e-mails.

“I am no longer interested. , You take too long to reply, so that is very suspicious, not gonna send a mic o probably won’t get back “

So I’ve done over 100+ microphones for people over the years. Every single one of them has received their repaired microphone back. Why would I want that many microphones? What could I possibly do with them all? I only have 4 radios and I’m obviously not selling them or the HTX community would definitely know about it. This is the first time I have ever been accused to being a thief and it’s apparently because I didn’t reply to an e-mail soon enough. So here is the response that I sent to said e-mail.

And here is the shipping snip I provided as proof.

So then I received a response saying it was because I didn’t call him. So now I’m a thief because I didn’t call him. Well out of all of the microphones I’ve repaired for people, I have only spoke to 3 of them. Maybe people are too trusting? Either way, I’ve never given anyone a reason to not trust me. Here is an image from my Ebay auction that shows my feedback related to the HTX-252 microphone repairs. Feel free to look me up on there and you’ll see my 100% positive feedback rating.

If after all this, you still think I am a Thief, then just move on because I am in this to help others, not to deal with drama.

If I have ever stolen your microphone please provide proof and say so in the comments. Likewise, if I’ve ever returned your microphone and you come back here just to read the updates, also leave a response.

73!

KU4BY

I recently had some free time, as did everyone else I’m sure, so I sat down and tested out a few cables for replacing the HTX-212 / HTX-242 microphones. I found one that works great and if you want to try to replace your own, you can get one here.

If you’d like to ship me your microphone to do the repair, just Contact Me and we’ll work out the specifics. The cost is $35 per microphone, just like the HTX-252’s.

I added a page for the repair but I only have a pic of the finished microphone so far. You can see that page here. More to come soon! An Ebay auction will go up as soon as I get more cables on hand as well.

73!

KU4BY

I started using Shipstation about a year ago to help me out with my shipping on both my HTX-252 microphones and my Ebay auctions.

I really love how easy it was to set up for both a personal and business account. For Ebay, it automatically downloads my sales and puts them in the same place so I can easily see what needs to be shipped and how.

Prior to using it, I was solely relying on Stamps.com which only allowed me to print postage but Shipstation is only half the price and with it, I still get the benefit of reduced postage rates from Stamps.com but I also get customized shipping e-mails and analytics for what is selling and who is buying them. So I immediately saved 50% on postage!

If you have me repair a microphone for you, you’ll receive an automated message with the tracking info and my contact information. Once it is delivered, you’ll receive another e-mail stating as such.

I’ve been so impressed that I figured I would share my positive experience that I don’t often do online anymore… 🙂

If you’re looking for an all in one shipping solution for pretty much any of the online sales services or even jut to create your own, click any of my affiliate links in the post. You won’t be disappointed and they have a free trial. If you have any questions about ShipStation, they have excellent customer service and if nothing else, I can help you out if you need it!

On a personal note, I do these campaigns to help offset the costs of repairing the HTX-252 microphones. I don’t really make much off of doing them and that is fine. I use whatever I receive to pay for the hosting of this site and buy soldering supplies and cords.

Thanks & 73!

KU4BY

Well a lot sure has changed in the 3 months since my last update. Covid-19 has kept a lot of people home and the airwaves busier from what I have heard. I’ve been working from home since October of 2019 so not too much changed for me in that aspect but eating at home every night sure has been different. I hope everyone makes it out OK and everyone manages to pick up some good habits out of all this like no touching your face! The Marine Corps helped me out with this one back in the day! 🙂

It’s business as usual for HTX-252 microphone repairs though. I’ve done about 15 of them in the last couple months. It seems like there was an uptick of them over the past few weeks so I’m guessing more and more people were wanting to break out their old rigs and get back on the air while stuck at home.

I currently have about 5 cords on hand with a couple of them possibly spoken for depending on whether or not the microphones show up. I do these on a first come first serve basis because I don’t like to keep anyone waiting if I don’t have to.

The cost and process is still the same.

• Send me your microphone and payment of $35 if paying via check. Paypal also accepted and just needs to be paid before I return your microphone. (You pay to ship to me)
• I’ll change out the cable with a thicker more durable one and test it out.
• I’ll ship the microphone back to you. (I pay return shipping.)

You can always reach me through my Contact Me page or but my QTH is good on QRZ.com as well.

Thanks and Stay Safe!

73!

KU4BY

If you sent me a message through my Contact Me page over the past year and a half and I didn’t respond to you, I may not have received it through my forwarding service.

I apologize for that. I receive and respond to a lot of them and thought everything was working great! Well in doing site maintenance over the weekend I found a lot of requests that never made it to my forwarding address for whatever reason. I just replied to what I believe to be all that I missed. So it really was me sending those messages out to you this morning. Sorry it took so long, but if you message me in the future it shouldn’t happen again. You can always contact me directly at my ku4by at arrl dot net email address as well.

Thanks and 73!

KU4BY

For those who are looking to get the cable replaced on their HTX-252 microphones, I am still refurbing them. I currently have 3 cords and a couple microphone connectors on hand if needed. Send me an e-mail to or hit up the Contact me page in the menu above. I have done about 60 of these microphones over the past few years and only had a couple that went sideways on me. One was a bad cord from the manufacturer and the other was a bad solder joint. It happens… 🙂

The process for this remains the same.

• Send me your microphone and payment of $35 if paying via check or MO. Paypal also accepted and just needs to be paid before I return your microphone. (You pay to ship to me)
• I’ll change out the cable with a thicker more durable one and test it out.
• I’ll ship the microphone back to you. (I pay return shipping.)

I do still have the Ebay auction online but I have to charge $10 more for that because of all of the fees involved through them and Paypal which equates to almost 15%. Don’t get me wrong, I love helping y’all out and keeping these cool little rigs on the air but I can’t do it for free!

My QTH is good on QRZ.com but feel free to contact me in advance to confirm that I have the supplies on hand necessary to complete the refurb.

For the HTX-242 microphones, I’m still looking for a suitable cable. I found one that works but the stress relief doesn’t fit the microphone case and I can’t keep purchasing random cables just to see if they’ll fit. So if you have a 242 microphone and a cable you think would work, let me know and I’ll give it a shot to see.

This weekend I did some basic site maintenance. This site is now 100% SSL enabled! So (hopefully) no more annoying messages in Google Chrome saying that it isn’t. Your connection to this site is now 100% encrypted. I also added a recaptcha box to the contact me form because there have been a ton of spam bots sending me messages lately. Finally, I added the cookie notice you should have seen at the bottom of the page when you first opened it up. I did this because I do use affiliate links in some of my posts and they keep track to make sure I get credit if you purchase anything. I don’t make much through affiliate links but every little bit helps in funding the cost of hosting this site. And last but not least, I removed my QSL gallery from the site because it got too large and was taking up a significant amount of space while slowing down my backups.

In the near future I plan on updating my log database to reflect my actual log’s current state. Also, I noticed some of the post comments aren’t showing up on the site for some reason. I’m looking into getting that fixed as well.

That’s it for now.

Thanks & 73!

KU4BY

So about a month or so I was running my full monthly backup on my HP Pavilion 17-g121wm laptop using Macrium Reflect. The full backup ran without a hitch as it always does and then the verification cycle began. I left the laptop to complete it’s mission and came back an couple of hours later to this error message:

Data Verification Failed?? What does that mean? Was it the reading of the data on the laptop in creating the image? Was it the writing of the image to the USB Drive that I was using? Where do you even begin to troubleshoot this??? I could always tested the image by trying to restore it to my laptop which would have made absolutely no sense because I could have ended up losing valuable data that I have accumulated since the previous month’s image if the image was corrupted. So I opted for the next easiest thing to do which was verify that my USB drive was not the culprit.

I use a USB 3.0 1TB My Passport Ultra for local storage of my backups. This particular drive I have owned for years and always had good luck with it but I have a few of them to backup my other machines as well. You can get them for around $50 bucks now and I think it’s well worth it! I didn’t use any elaborate testing software or anything. All I used is the Windows CHKDSK utility. There are tons of tutorials all over the Internet to show you how to do this if you need to. It’s always good to monitor the health of your drives so it’s good to know information anyway.

I ran CHKDSK H: and it reported 0 issues. SO now it appeared that my USB Drive was fine and that left me back at square one with what the Block and File Offset problems could be coming from because if the issue isn’t my USB Hard Drive then it has to be something with my laptop hardware and that’s never fun to troubleshoot!

After a few Google searches I ended up on Macrium’s website in a troubleshooting section that specifically referred to Verification Failures which is located here.

They seemed to concur that this is typically caused by hardware issues even though my laptop was still saying that my C: was healthy, my RAM was showing 16GB as it should, and I had no other noticeable issues with any of the programs that I used on a daily basis that would indicate some sort of failure in general. So now I had to verify that the RAM wasn’t the issue.

Beginning with Windows 7, Microsoft included a neat little utility to test your system’s memory called Windows Memory Diagnostic. You can get to it by Clicking on Start, then search for mdsched.exe or Memory and it should show up. Basically it schedules a memory test for the next time you reboot. There are a lot of different options you can select depending on how in-depth of a test you want performed. I went with the default settings and figured I would dive in deeper if it came back saying everything was OK, but it didn’t.

I watched the test run and almost immediately it came back saying I had a system issue that I needed Vendor involvement to fix. So in other words, something was up with one of my 2 RAM sticks. The only problem with that is that it either didn’t say which one was causing the problem or I just flat out missed it.

I opened up the laptop and removed one of the RAM sticks which brought me down to 8GB of RAM and then ran the memory diagnostic once again. The test found no issues this time and said my RAM was good to go. Then I removed that stick of ram and installed the other 8GB stick and ran the test again but this time I received the same error message as before saying Vendor involvement was required.

I pulled that RAM stick out and stuck it in an ESD Safe bag. Then I replaced the reported good RAM stick in the laptop. I performed a RAM upgrade about a year ago replacing the original 2 sticks of 4GB with 2 sticks of 8GB from Crucial so I still had the original 4GB sticks handy. I installed a 4GB stick along with the 8GB stick and retried the Memory Diagnostic test. This time the test passed with no issues and my laptop was showing 10GB of RAM installed. Everything was good again except I lost 4GB of RAM in the process.

Now for the good news! Crucial Memory carries a Limited Lifetime Warranty which means I was able to go to their website, file a Return Authorization with them, send them my bad memory stick, and then receive a brand new replacement! Sure it cost me a few bucks to send them my defective memory stick but in return, they sent me the brand new 8GB stick free of charge. You can see below that their warranty saved me about $76!

The turn around time from when I sent them my RAM stick to when I received my new RAM stick was about a week. When I received the replacement, I installed it and then went back through the testing process above with Windows Memory Diagnostic and it passed with both 8GB sticks installed.

For the final test, I ran another backup of my laptop with automatic verification and it passed verification. So I really did end up having a hidden RAM issue that never showed itself until I went to do a backup verification.

I always do a backup with verification for obvious reasons and when the verification fails, Reflect deletes the backup. At the time I was too freaked out about the thought of losing data that I didn’t think to try a backup without verification so that I could test it later to see if the issue was really with the created backup or if it was just an issue with Macrium not being able to verify it correctly due to the bad RAM stick. So if you’re reading this because you are in the same boat that I was in, make a test backup to test verification on later and let me know what happens!

I would like to add that I did not purchase these RAM sticks directly from Crucial originally. I purchased them from Amazon because they were cheaper on there and yet Crucial still stood by their warranty! Thanks Again Crucial!

I just added a Contact Page for those of you who would like to get up with me about anything on my site. This way you can comment on the page for others to see or you can contact me directly if you’d like to get your HTX-252 microphone cable replaced. I typically reply to everyone who posts a comment but it is usually through e-mail and it’s not public so some of the comments appear to go unanswered but I assure you all that this is just not the case. 

So if you’d like to contact me through this site, there is a link at the top of each page labelled Contact Me that will take you to a page where you can do so.

73!

 

Steve

I’ll be uploading stuff to Ebay over the next month or so. You can see what I have by clicking on the link below.

Click Here to View My Auctions!

I just sent out 75 QSL cards to the ARRL Bureau today. Most of them were cards I owed to others so if you’re expecting a card from me and never received it, check my QSL Search Page and you’ll see if it was sent. 73! for now.