| Sometimes, Troubleshooting Is Hard I hop in the Jeep the other day and turn on my ham radio. Have I mentioned I'm a licensed amateur radio operator? Yeah, yeah, I know. I won't shut up about it. Ha! My call sign is KC1KCE. I haven't been on HF in a while, but I'm regularly on the air locally here in OK. I also take a radio with me sometimes while traveling, so you might hear me on your local repeaters. OK. Back to the story. I turn on my radio. I'm going to go ahead and name and shame in this story. It's a Radioddity DB-25D. It's a Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) so it can do both digital and analog transmission and reception. I also own it's sister, the GD-88, a handheld DMR radio. Now, I used to love this radio. When I first got it, it did so much. Active Packet Reporting System (APRS), DMR, analog, all in a tiny little package with a great color screen, I was happy as could be. Fit nicely on the dash in the Jeep. Great radio.... well, two years in. This thing is quirky and strange. Some days, it just won't turn on. I can't figure out why. I've traced the cable. It has power. Fuses aren't blown. Everything is, in theory, fine. But the radio won't turn on. Next day. Fires right up. Nothing changed. So, anyway, this time, it turns on. I grab the microphone. I hit the Push-to-talk (PTT) button. The radio restarts. Weird. Hit the PTT. It restarts. OK. That's odd. Well, I'm on Channel A. I'll switch to Channel B (this radio actually has two transceivers built in, unlike a lot of radios that only have one and bounce between VFO A & B to act like two radios). Hit the PTT. Restarts. I show my wife, "Look at this stupid thing." She could care less about radios, but at least I have a witness. Well, OK. Must be a problem in the microphone. I unplug it. Check the connection. Looks good. Plug it back in. PTT, restart. Fine. I actually have a second one of these radios (another story, but I have a brand new, in the box, only used once radio and I didn't pay a penny for it). So, try that microphone and PTT. Restart. OK. Radio is dead right? It has to be internal. I switch frequencies. Hit the PTT. It's fine. WHAT IN THE EVER LUVIN.... OK. Switch back to the first frequency. It's fine. Swap to Channel A. It's fine. Radio is fine. Everything is working. Plug in the original microphone. It's working too. Yeah, the radio just randomly decided, on its own, to behave in a strange manner. Then, decided, on its own, to fix itself. A few days earlier, I was working on code samples for the book I'm writing (an update to the query tuning book for SQL Server 2025). I'm running some queries and then looking at them in cache. Only, the query isn't in cache. What the heck? I run it a few times. Maybe I turned on Optimize for Ad Hoc. Nope. Still not in cache. Double check. Yes, the query is running. I'm not getting errors. It just won't go into cache. It's in the Query Store. I can see it run in Extended Events. It won't go into cache. Fine. I try another query. Nope. Another. Nope. Cache simply isn't letting queries in. I check all the settings. Memory. Everything. No joy. Queries are executing, but nothing is visible in sys.dm_exec_query_stats. I restart the container. It's fine. Everything is fine. Never had that problem before. I've never had it since. Just one, random slice in time where everything got weird for a bit, just like with my radio. Troubleshooting can be hard. Oh, and if anyone has a recommendation for a mobile DMR radio that does APRS, I'm in the market. Just have to convince Michele. Wish me luck! Grant Fritchey Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums |
