Sorry for the delay but I thought I responded to your post. Here is an update for people interested.
PI was very helpful although not very technical. They kept insisting it was the cable to the remote and said it would not work without it. They first sent a new cable, then a new remote, and finally a whole new unit. The reason they sent me a new unit is when I got home and plugged into shore power, I got the E-0 but the contactor was not closing. While I was waiting for the new unit I decided to troubleshoot the bad one. I new I was not getting the neutral to the contactor to turn it on so I started there. What I found by tracing the circuit out is there was a chip missing. When the new one got here, sure enough it had the missing chip (an optocoupler/phototriac). I bench tested the new one and it was good.
So I learned that the remote and cable is not needed for it to power on and my generator needs the bonded neutral/ground plug for it to work with it.
Is this a Progressive EMS ?
The gen open neutral will just have the EMS finding it as a fault and not allow the power past the EMS
The Progressive EMS has a 'bypass' feature which allows power through bypassing most of the protections (surge protection remains).
The Progressive EMS can also be manually closed, but is not documented real well.
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And if it is Progressive, they have pretty good customer support, call them Monday.
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I also forgot to respond what I found with the "manual closing" of the contactor. With the ones without the remote, you remove the blue line from the circuit board and connect it to the contactor and that bypasses everything. I could have done that with this one but it does not come with the connector attached since the "bypass" is on the remote and is controlled by the main circuit board (not surge protection board). The reason the bypass did not work for me is due to the missing chip. The chip monitors for overvoltage (I think based on the data sheet) and passes the neutral if all is well or bypass is selected.