MGL Avionics User Forum

Hi All,

Last year, I installed an N16 with a Razor head. I have not flown very much and the aircraft has kind of been left during all these lock downs.

I went to the airfield today to do some maintenance and noticed I was getting loads of interference through the intercom. I traced this to the N16 audio output. The reason was that the squelch had changed to a very low value (defaults). I changed the squelch and a couple of other settings like volume and then all was ok. When I turned the unit off and on again, all the settings had gone back to default. I tried a couple more times and everytime the N16 and Razor is power cycled, it seems to revert back.

My question is, does the N16 or Razor head or both have a backup battery as the settings do not seem to save after power off. I saw one of the pins says KeepAlive but the manual says do not connect.

I would appreciate any suggestions as to why the settings are not saving or something I may be doing wrong.

Best Regards
Steve

Can I please ask you to update the N16 firmware to that released on our website please ?

I have tested this extensively here after your report but am unable to get it to go wrong. It uses internal Flash memory to store the information - in fact the processors own flash memory that also holds its program (just different flash sectors).
It uses two large sectors of 128KBytes each. The data is stored in records (4096 per sector). Each time something changes (like a frequency or squelch/volume setting) it writes a new record to the flash memory (it can only be written once per empty record). Once all 4096 records have been filled it moves to the second record and clears the first record. It then continues another 4096 records in the second sector before flipping back to the first.
On startup it looks for the last record written - that's the starting value(s).

The memory is rated for 10.000 erase cycles so you have lifetime of at least 82 million changes at minimum. It only writes a new record if something changed - and it waits a few seconds after a change to make sure that are not any other changes (for example if you change volume there would be several changes in a short space of time typically - it waits until it looks like nothing more is happening before storing the new values.

Thanks Rainier,

Just a few key words in your explanation has made it completely clear why I was getting the save settings issue. I was completely unaware of the time delay. I have put a complete description below just in case anyone else runs in to this.

I purchased the N16 quite a while ago (probably around when it was first released) but it was only installed fairly recently. This would of had the original firmware that it was delivered with at that time. The original firmware did appear to have a fault with saving settings because settings were changed prior to a flight and the unit would not have been powered off until the end of the flight. Then at the start of the next flight we noted that the settings had reverted.

I then upgraded to the latest version of the firmware. But now, I was actively testing for the fault so I was making a change and then power cycling the unit immediately. I was completely unaware of the time delay. The reason the settings were saving occasionally was because on those attempts, I was a bit slower turning the unit off. Not something that would really happen in the real world.

So with the latest firmware, the settings save correctly, you just have to be aware that you need to wait a few seconds before removing power.

Regards
Steve