16
New cellular dialer gave me 8 hours of headache
I installed a new cellular communicator on a DSC panel last Tuesday and what should have been a 30 minute swap turned into an all day nightmare. The unit kept giving me a registration failed error and I spent way too long checking power, antenna placement, and signal strength. Turns out the firmware was oudated and needed an update through the installer app but the app wasnt connecting to the server right. I drove back to the shop to grab my laptop and tether it to my phone just to get the damn thing to update. After 4 trips up and down the attic ladder I finally got it online around 5 PM. Has anyone else run into weird firmware issues with the newer alarm communicators that just eat up your whole day?
3 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In3 Comments
lily3941mo ago
drove me up a wall too with one of those @haydenp95. what finally worked for me was hard resetting the panel and redoing the registration from scratch after the firmware update. still took forever though.
6
the_cole1mo ago
Yeah I feel you man I had almost the exact same thing happen last month with a cellular dialer on a Vista panel. Spent a solid 5 hours fighting with it before I found out the firmware was so old it wouldn't even talk to the app. I drove back and forth to the shop twice because I kept forgetting a cable or the right adapter. Even after updating the firmware through a laptop tether it still threw random errors for another hour. It's like these companies push out half baked hardware and expect us to beta test it on the clock. I've been doing this for years and some of these newer communicators are just a total pain compared to the old landline ones.
0
haydenp951mo ago
Did you ever figure out if it was a bad batch of those cellular dialers or just a one-off lemon? I've seen some installs where the cell signal itself was fine but the board had some kind of cold solder joint that only acted up after it warmed up for an hour. That firmware thing sounds brutal too, did Honeywell or whoever make yours give you any support on it or were you stuck guessing?
8