[R-390] S&W R-390A, It's ALIVE!

[mikea]

On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 03:15:00AM -0500, Steve Kent wrote:
> After checking everything twice and extracting a slug from a transformer 
> and replacing three slugs and wiring up the variac, I caught my foot on 
> the Ethernet cable that was wrapped around my right shoe and flung my 
> laptop off my bench and on to the concrete floor cracking the LCD 
> screen. Wonderful! At least the LCD's last image displayed was the Y2k 
> manual so it went out in style.

That would have to improve lots to just suck hard, but odds are that you
can use an external monitor. LCDs are pretty cheap and not at all hard to
replace. Google for your lapdog's model number and see what you can find.
It's a PITA that the lapdog's gone

> So after a few, well many, choice words, I calmly hooked up my audio 
> transformer, speaker, an antenna and brought the voltage up slowly.

Look up "tenterhooks". Or don't, if you know the word's meaning.

> Believe it or not, it works! Mostly....  The dial calibration of off by 
> about 9kc, I see no action out of the meters and the sensitivity, in 
> this non-scientific test, is generally not very hot. So it needs an 
> alignment at minimum and some troubleshooting on the meter ckts. There 
> are some other strange things going on.  It seems like certain 'ranges' 
> on the KC dial are noisy, almost like the noise tracks the mechanical 
> rotation of the knob. It also seems like when switching between AGC and 
> MGC, the RX goes quiet for about 30 seconds, sometimes.  Need to check 
> this out another night.

There _are_ certain chunks of spectrum -- here, at least -- that are
noisy all the time. The noise shows up on every rig I have, and is easily
observable on a spectrum analyzer. Is this what you're seeing, or is it
that the same KC area(s) for every position of the MC switch?

I've got one R-390A that does the mute-for-30 when I move the AGC knob. I
haven't dug into the thing yet, and the rest of it was working fine, so
it's a minor annoyance.

You done good, OM, and I hope you restore the the lapdog to full capability
soon. Very 73, de

-- 
Mike Andrews, W5EGO
mikea at mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin