TD-H3 transmitting but not showing up on SWR meter

[hxpx]

Hello! I'm new to mobile radios so I want to make sure I'm not doing something wrong before I send my radio in.

I've got four TIDRadio H3s, two GMRS units and two ham units that were unlocked and changed to GMRS mode. I've been trying to hit a local repeater unsuccessfully so I picked up a Surecom SW33 to make sure my radios/antennas are actually working correctly. Three of the four are showing a VSWR around 1.4 and an output wattage around 5W with the same antenna so I think I'm just too far out from the repeater to hit it.

The problem is the fourth radio (one of the ham units) doesn't show anything on the SW33 when transmitting. Other radios can hear it transmit short range - I've tested it on simplex channels across the house and through some walls but nothing long distance - but the SW33 is acting like it's not doing anything.

(Edit: Should note I also tried it with the 50 ohm dummy load that came with the meter and still got no output reading.)

Are there other things I can check or change in my test setup or was this radio DOA and needs to be replaced?

 

(Side question: regarding forum etiquette, should I have piggybacked off GrouserPad's similar thread for this or was starting a new thread appropriate?)

Edited May 9 by hxpx
Added test note

[hxpx]

I might as well throw this in here: remember that "don't leave your battery plugged into the radio when you charge it because it'll fry your radio" video that made the rounds a while back? Charged one of my batteries from 50% to 100% and stuck a multimeter on it when the light turned green. 12v - not quite the 15v other people got but still much higher than the 7.2v the batteries are supposed to be outputting.

[SteveShannon]

1 hour ago, hxpx said:

I might as well throw this in here: remember that "don't leave your battery plugged into the radio when you charge it because it'll fry your radio" video that made the rounds a while back? Charged one of my batteries from 50% to 100% and stuck a multimeter on it when the light turned green. 12v - not quite the 15v other people got but still much higher than the 7.2v the batteries are supposed to be outputting.

I’ve never seen a battery that could be charged to twice its design voltage, but I admit I’m not an expert on all battery types. 

[hxpx]

11 minutes ago, SteveShannon said:

I’ve never seen a battery that could be charged to twice its design voltage, but I admit I’m not an expert on all battery types. 

I've heard the issue is that it's dumping the battery voltage plus the charging voltage once it hits 100% instead of shutting off the charger.

[SteveShannon]

2 minutes ago, hxpx said:

I've heard the issue is that it's dumping the battery voltage plus the charging voltage once it hits 100% instead of shutting off the charger.

It appears that your battery is in the charger while you’re measuring the voltage at the terminals that connect to the radio. 
I could see a firmware error (maybe even intentional but not what I would expect) in the charger increasing the charging voltage to the wrong voltage. If so, that should be a fairly obvious error that TidRadio should remedy. If that is what’s happening it could definitely let the magic smoke out of radio circuits. That would match your picture. 
My Alinco radio has a warning about powering on the radio while the radio and battery is on the charger. I’ll plug it in and see what voltage appears on the battery terminals while charging outside of the battery. 

[hxpx]

16 minutes ago, SteveShannon said:

It appears that your battery is in the charger while you’re measuring the voltage at the terminals that connect to the radio. 
I could see a firmware error (maybe even intentional but not what I would expect) in the charger increasing the charging voltage to the wrong voltage. If so, that should be a fairly obvious error that TidRadio should remedy. If that is what’s happening it could definitely let the magic smoke out of radio circuits. That would match your picture. 
My Alinco radio has a warning about powering on the radio while the radio and battery is on the charger. I’ll plug it in and see what voltage appears on the battery terminals while charging outside of the battery. 

It's a known issue that's resulted in some fried radios. Someone made a video about it a while back (I think someone shared it on here - maybe in GrouserPad's thread?) and Tidradio made a note in my warranty replacement emails to always disconnect the battery when charging. Don't know if newer batteries have addressed the issue. I actually haven't unpacked my latest warranty replacement - I should see if that battery has the same issue.

[SteveShannon]

15 minutes ago, SteveShannon said:

My Alinco radio has a warning about powering on the radio while the radio and battery is on the charger. I’ll plug it in and see what voltage appears on the battery terminals while charging outside of the battery. 

My Alinco charger with battery shows 7.93 vDC. My Baofeng shows 8.08 vDC. 
None of my battery chargers put out anything close to 12-15 vDC to a 7.4 volt lithium battery. 

[SteveShannon]

3 minutes ago, hxpx said:

It's a known issue that's resulted in some fried radios. Someone made a video about it a while back (I think someone shared it on here - maybe in GrouserPad's thread?) and Tidradio made a note in my warranty replacement emails to always disconnect the battery when charging. Don't know if newer batteries have addressed the issue. I actually haven't unpacked my latest warranty replacement - I should see if that battery has the same issue.

That’s what I’m saying; I don’t think it’s the battery. I think your charger is pushing too high of voltage. 
Take the battery off the charger and then measure the voltage at the battery terminals. 

[hxpx]

1 minute ago, SteveShannon said:

My Alinco charger with battery shows 7.93 vDC. My Baofeng shows 8.08 vDC. 
None of my battery chargers put out anything close to 12-15 vDC to a 7.4 volt lithium battery. 

Wonder if the Alinco warning is due to the sudden voltage dip/current draw on power up messing with the charger. Kenwood's TH-D75 manual recommends not TXing while the battery is charging because the sudden power draw causes issues:

Quote

Do not transmit while the supplied charger is connected.
The supplied charger is only for charging and does not have
the current capacity required for transmission. Accidental
transmission may cause a sudden voltage drop, resulting in
malfunction or failure. 

 

1 minute ago, SteveShannon said:

That’s what I’m saying; I don’t think it’s the battery. I think your charger is pushing too high of voltage. 

The H3 batteries charge over USB-C and I'm using an Anker charger that I've used on pretty much everything else. While the battery is charging, it only showed 7.5-8v across the terminals. Shot up to 12v as soon as the light turned green.

I can try it with the little single port USB block they included with the radio if you want another data point. Lemme unpack this radio and let's see what happens (assuming the battery isn't fully charged from the factory).

[SteveShannon]

1 minute ago, hxpx said:

While the battery is charging, it only showed 7.5-8v across the terminals. Shot up to 12v as soon as the light turned green.

Which is why I suspect a firmware issue with the charger increasing. Once the light turns green the charger should only provide the voltage necessary to maintain the battery. It shouldn’t increase the voltage that high. 
What does the fully charged battery voltage show when it’s out of the charger?

[hxpx]

Just now, SteveShannon said:

Which is why I suspect a firmware issue with the charger increasing. Once the light turns green the charger should only provide the voltage necessary to maintain the battery. It shouldn’t increase the voltage that high. 
What does the fully charged battery voltage show when it’s out of the charger?

Right around 8v.

The one I pulled out of the box was at 7.5v and is currently charging. Bumped up to 7.7v on the included charger. I'll test it again and post photos when it's done charging (maybe in the morning depending on when it's done).

[SteveShannon]

8 minutes ago, hxpx said:

Wonder if the Alinco warning is due to the sudden voltage dip/current draw on power up messing with the charger. Kenwood's TH-D75 manual recommends not TXing while the battery is charging because the sudden power draw causes issues:

That could be. When transmitting the battery will provide the necessary power but I would expect a slight voltage drop which might cause issues for the charger. 

[SteveShannon]

5 minutes ago, hxpx said:

Right around 8v.

The one I pulled out of the box was at 7.5v and is currently charging. Bumped up to 7.7v on the included charger. I'll test it again and post photos when it's done charging (maybe in the morning depending on when it's done).

That’s just about ideal. So the charger is definitely putting out 12 volts once the battery is fully charged. That seems completely wrong to me. For the example I listed earlier, the Baofeng charger displayed a green light and was putting out 8.08 vDC. The Alinco charger is still charging and it shows 8.34. When it turns green I’ll measure it again. 

[hxpx]

9 hours ago, SteveShannon said:

That’s just about ideal. So the charger is definitely putting out 12 volts once the battery is fully charged. That seems completely wrong to me. For the example I listed earlier, the Baofeng charger displayed a green light and was putting out 8.08 vDC. The Alinco charger is still charging and it shows 8.34. When it turns green I’ll measure it again. 

Alright, finished charging sometime after 2am, so here's the album. 

Battery read 8.57v both on the little single port charger and the Anker charger after being fully charged. Maybe they fixed them? I'm going to run this battery down to ~50% to replicate the condition of my first battery and then we'll charge it again to confirm.

 

Edit: Put the old battery on the charger out of the box: 12v again. It's gotta be something with the internal charging circuit on the battery.

[WSIA835]

12 hours ago, hxpx said:

@WSIA835 They did not charge money when they sent me warranty replacements. First warranty radio came from a warehouse up in NY or NJ, second radio came from Amazon (ha).

Good to know.  I would have figured that replacements would have come direct from China.

[hxpx]

Just now, WSIA835 said:

Good to know.  I would have figured that replacements would have come direct from China.

Tidradio has their own Amazon shop which is probably why the replacement came from Amazon. Took about a week to get it to me once they sent the "replacement is on the way!" email. They're good to work with. They did ask me for pictures for their engineering team since I mentioned hooking it up to an SWR meter, but they never followed up on them.

[SteveShannon]

1 hour ago, hxpx said:

Alright, finished charging sometime after 2am, so here's the album. 

Battery read 8.57v both on the little single port charger and the Anker charger after being fully charged. Maybe they fixed them? I'm going to run this battery down to ~50% to replicate the condition of my first battery and then we'll charge it again to confirm.

 

Edit: Put the old battery on the charger out of the box: 12v again. It's gotta be something with the internal charging circuit on the battery.

My Alinco dedicated charger tops out at 8.41 vDC once the light turns green. That’s typically considered the max charge voltage for a lithium battery (actually 4.2 vDC per cell and the 7.4 vDC battery is made up of two cells).

I wonder if the issue is that it’s a usb-c charging device rather than a dedicated charger. That would rely on the internal battery circuitry to regulate the voltage because the usb-c charger has no idea how many cells are in the battery. 

[SteveShannon]

25 minutes ago, SteveShannon said:

My Alinco dedicated charger tops out at 8.41 vDC once the light turns green. That’s typically considered the max charge voltage for a lithium battery (actually 4.2 vDC per cell and the 7.4 vDC battery is made up of two cells).

I wonder if the issue is that it’s a usb-c charging device rather than a dedicated charger. That would rely on the internal battery circuitry to regulate the voltage because the usb-c charger has no idea how many cells are in the battery. 

I found this snippet in a bunch of articles on hackaday:

MURDEROUS “USB-C” PSUS AT YOUR LOCAL LIDL

Remember the power article, specifically, how you get to higher voltages? Let’s recap: you get 5 V first, and then only after resistor detection. Higher voltages require negotiations over a digital protocol. This is a safety rule – it’s how you can use the same USB-C charger for your laptop, your phone, your wireless headphones, your devboards and whatever else.

Now, what happens when someone builds a power supply with a fixed higher-than-5 V output, say, 12 V, and puts a USB-C plug on it? The answer is – seriously bad things happen. Such a power supply isn’t safe to be used on actual USB-C devices – it’s likely to destroy your phone or laptop, and it’s at a glance indistinguishable from an adapter that follows the USB-C rules laid out for everyone else. If you must use such an adapter for something every now and then, you ought to mark its cable with red tape in a way that covers the connector plug, so that you (or your loved one) don’t grab it to charge something else. Seriously, it’s easy to make a mistake, and the more you get comfortable with USB-C, the more likely you are to make it.

Who does this? Well, many no-name manufacturers do, but also Lidl Parkside tools, for one. CrowPi does this too, in their recently released CrowPi L laptop. Both of these come with dumb “USB-C” 12 V power supplies, and neither of them should be sold to consumers, especially given that the CrowPi laptop is designed for kids and educational purposes, and Parkside tools are designed for non-tech-savvy people. When your kid burns a $500 smartphone or your granddad burns his laptop due to a $2 power supply, that’s when the gravity of this standard violation really sets in.

[hxpx]

39 minutes ago, SteveShannon said:

I found this snippet in a bunch of articles on hackaday:

MURDEROUS “USB-C” PSUS AT YOUR LOCAL LIDL

Remember the power article, specifically, how you get to higher voltages? Let’s recap: you get 5 V first, and then only after resistor detection. Higher voltages require negotiations over a digital protocol. This is a safety rule – it’s how you can use the same USB-C charger for your laptop, your phone, your wireless headphones, your devboards and whatever else.

Now, what happens when someone builds a power supply with a fixed higher-than-5 V output, say, 12 V, and puts a USB-C plug on it? The answer is – seriously bad things happen. Such a power supply isn’t safe to be used on actual USB-C devices – it’s likely to destroy your phone or laptop, and it’s at a glance indistinguishable from an adapter that follows the USB-C rules laid out for everyone else. If you must use such an adapter for something every now and then, you ought to mark its cable with red tape in a way that covers the connector plug, so that you (or your loved one) don’t grab it to charge something else. Seriously, it’s easy to make a mistake, and the more you get comfortable with USB-C, the more likely you are to make it.

Who does this? Well, many no-name manufacturers do, but also Lidl Parkside tools, for one. CrowPi does this too, in their recently released CrowPi L laptop. Both of these come with dumb “USB-C” 12 V power supplies, and neither of them should be sold to consumers, especially given that the CrowPi laptop is designed for kids and educational purposes, and Parkside tools are designed for non-tech-savvy people. When your kid burns a $500 smartphone or your granddad burns his laptop due to a $2 power supply, that’s when the gravity of this standard violation really sets in.

It's not a USB-C/12v power supply, though - it's a standard 5V/2A USB-A brick. My Anker desktop chargers are also 5V, though they support PD on the USB-C ports (which your article mentions does go above 5v but it has to be negotiated by the device and I'm pretty sure these H3 batteries aren't PD compatible). The Anker chargers work fine on other 5V USB devices, including some 18650/14500 batteries that charge via USB (through a USB-A to XH2.54 or similar connector). I'm guessing the charging circuitry is embedded in the USB-A plug housing.

Side note: I do have a 12v USB power supply that came with my Thermoworks Billows fan for my smoker and that thing scares me. Other than the 12v warning on it, it looks identical to any other USB charger. It doesn't get separated from the fan or the controller.

(Edit: I actually just checked and the Thermoworks 12v power supply has a USB-A socket. Which seems even sketchier. Good thing it has that grey-on-black 12V warning on it.)

1 hour ago, SteveShannon said:

I wonder if the issue is that it’s a usb-c charging device rather than a dedicated charger. That would rely on the internal battery circuitry to regulate the voltage because the usb-c charger has no idea how many cells are in the battery. 

Yeah, it's gotta be the internal battery circuitry malfunctioning when the batteries are 100% charged. Unfortunately, there's no way to crack open one of these H3 batteries and poke at internal connections without destroying the shell, so I think my experiments end once I discharge/recharge this new battery.