So, I'm looking on Craigslist for interesting stuff (I certainly
prefer austin.forsale, but Craigslist seems to have become popular
lately, so ...) and I saw this post --

http://austin.craigslist.org/pts/75003901.html

he's selling instructions on how to fix some specific problems.

Well, the radio in our 1998 Ford Explorer does have the problem he's
claiming to tell you how to fix -- the display is off most of the
time, but sometimes it's dim, or part of it's on and part is off,
perhaps partly dim, and sometimes it's on normal brightness -- there
seems to be no rhyme or reason to when it's working, partly working or
not working at all. Beyond the display, it all works fine.

Common sense and past experience tells me that if somebody is
_selling_ instructions like this, that they're available for free
somewhere else online. In fact, it seems that often when somebody is
selling something like this, they're reselling _exactly_ what somebody
else is giving away for free -- basically they're profiting from
somebody else's work, and other's (my, in this case) ignorance about
where the information really came from. That, and he's a spammer, and
I don't do business with spammers.

http://www.google.com/search?q=link:...ory.com/radio/

Googling around, I found some people talking about the problem -- it
seems to be pretty common -- but nothing about an actual fix.

I wonder if this post to Usenet has anything to do with the lack of
the actual fix --

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...641318c1?hl=en

sounds like something ... creative from a spammer who might not want
this information to be available.

I could certainly open up the radio myself and look around -- I have
some small amount of skill at fixing electrical things -- but if it's
a known problem, a description of the problem and the difficulty of
fixing it wouldn't be a bad thing at all ...

I've found some stuff that indicates it's a loose solder joint
(http://www.fixyourford.com/feedback.html) which would be easy enough
to fix, though I'm still a bit confused about how a single bad solder
joint would cause the display to ... vary like it does now.

--
Is the poop deck really what I think it is? --Homer Simpson