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

[Steve Kent]

Thanks for the kind words.  A replacement LCD is already on the way, so 
It will be up and running fairly soon. I had to hook it up to an 
external monitor just to shut it down! Can't believe I did that!

On the noise, I need to do a couple basic things, like d/c the antenna, 
and so on and then I can report further.

It is good to know that this one isn't the only one with the mute-for-30 
'feature'.  One more thisng to look in to.

Regards &73,
Steve Kent - KW5CQ

mikea wrote:
> 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
>
>