Our SSB starting acting strange, and then stopped working entirely. I was disgusted and tired to death of working on the boat, so I was extremely unmotivated to delve into it. And extremely skeptical that the problem was anything we could fix–I’ve dismantled plenty of electronics before in an attempt to find the culprit component and replace it, and very few of those attempts were successful. Usually when a component goes, it takes too much else with it. Pete, who happened to be on board with us at that time, was fresh and motivated and excited to dismantle the radio. Thank goodness Pete was around, because I never would have gone to the extent that he did to attempt a repair.
We suspected that it was the volume circuit, because of the way it was behaving during failure. Pete took the case apart and we painstakingly searched for any signs of a failure. Luckily, we spotted one. It’s hard to see from the pictures, but there was an area of the circuit board in the corner that was messed up by a blown capacitor–the capacitor itself had blackened the board, and a gooey dielectric had oozed out and ruined a couple of traces. Even after we found the problem, I still thought it only 10% likely that we’d be able to repair it. Undaunted, Pete dismantled it, went and bought a capacitor and painstakingly reconstructed the necessary connections.
Remarkably, it worked. And it worked fantastically for us all the way across the pacific. We never had another problem with it. Between our radio, and our updated/reconstructed ground plane, we had one of the most powerful, longest distance radios out there. So bottoms up to Pete, who did a fantastic job with this one.
