Mark Zacharias wrote:
OK, so it appears there is very little to discuss on this group in
areas like repairing audio components, amps, receivers, power
supplies, etc these days.

I "tune in" here almost daily and rarely find anything of interest to
me.
Maybe we could share some "war stories" of cool repairs we have done
in the past.

Re-live some past glories?

The first time you traced down a bad reset line for a microprocessor?

That integrated amp that blew a channel about once a year until you
caught that bias diode occasionally opening up?

Sansui 5000A's? (yuck)

Crappy Euro caps in Tandberg tape decks?

Those times you sweated whether you could even get this thing put back
together?

Any more recent successs stories to brag about?

C'mon, don't we all enjoy patting ourselves on the back, really?


Mark Z.

One of my first chances to stick my chest out and strut was shortly after I
checked aboard my first duty ship during my stint in the Navy in mid-1964.
Barely 20 years old, I was assigned to overhaul & repair of UHF shipboard
radio transmitters.

The ship had a small calibration lab, which was staffed by a PO1, a PO2s and
a couple PO3s (POs are Petty Officers... enlisted men) who had all been to
the elite Air Force PMEL calibration school in Colorado. One day, after all
the cal lab techs had a shot at it and several of the other bench techs had
also been called in to try fixing it,, I was called in to take a shot at
repairing a new HP 524D 10MC digital counter from another ship. It just
wouldn't show any indication of trying to count... all the displays just
sat at zero no matter what the input signal looked like.

I sat down and took a look at the schematic, hooked a scope probe to the
output of the gate tube, a 6AL5. No pulses. Hooked the probe to the gate
input to the gate tube. Good gate pulses. Hooked the probe to the signal
input of the gate tube. Good squared pulses that followed the frequency of
the input signal.
I asked for a 6AL5 tube, plugged it in, and Voila! everything came to life.

Made me feel kinda good that it only took me about 10 minutes to fix what
had stumped 9 or 10 good techs for several days. From that day until now, I
have had an affinity for test instruments, especially those used for time &
frequency measurement.

Dave M