Philip Gamble: freeg131

I’ve had my PURE Tempus 1S Digital Radio for 2 or 3 years now and until recently experienced no problems.

A couple of weeks ago I woke up to find that the radio had died in its sleep – it was effectively frozen, stuck displaying a time from the early hours of the morning. Pressing the buttons on the front of the radio had no effect, to get it going again I had to pull out the power cable from the back.

The radio went through a brief restart phase and had to search for the time again – though thankfully it retained radio presets and alarm settings using the power from the internal battery. The radio would then be fully functional until the next time it decided to crash. There were seemingly random but regular intervals between freezes (multiple times a day) after which the power cable need to be disconnected and reinserted in order to force a restart.

Although the radio froze during the night and whilst I was out at work sometimes the radio would freeze when I was listening to it. This normally came when I was adjusting its volume, activating the sleep function or attempting to turn it off whilst laying in bed. The effect of the stoppage was the same – the cable needed to be removed, reinserted and then the desired operation selected again.

The fix
Using a Type A – Type B (I think?) USB cable I connected the radio to my laptop and went through the process described here. You must first select your operating system and then the radio model (in my case Tempus 1S, but there are other Tempus models so be careful!). You are then guided to download a program to your computer which takes you through the process of connecting the radio. The radios old firmware is then backed up to your computer and new firmware downloaded from the Internet and transferred via the USB to the radio.

The whole process took about 15 minutes once I had located the correct cable from my box of technology bits. And it worked – the radio is now fully functional and has not crashed since. No need to worry about the alarm not going off 6:30 tomorrow

Video

The first part of the video demonstrates the problem. Wrong time being displayed and the radio not turning on when the power button is pressed. The power wire is removed and placed back in and then the radio functions properly.

The long term fix is next: Inserting the USB cable to connect radio and computer, switch on the radio and follow the instructions from the download. Once I decided to see if the firmware could be upgraded it was all rather simple.