Got meter replaced & all is fine now. I did find a very, almost invisible,
fine piece of metal that was causing the sticking problem on bad meter. It was
on left side of magnetic sticking up enough to cause problems. Chip, N3IW,
said he had same problem with his. It was just too small to see while mounted
in rig.
You do have to take apart a plastic meter to remove the guts, but it only took
me a few minutes to do that. The hard part is getting the old one out. The
meter is held in a special plastic mount, that you will need to order also,
that has tabs that are melted to hold meter in place on circuit board. I have
a very small 15 watt pencil size soldering iron for that job, but still was a
little tight to melt the tabs so meter could be removed. You could remove top
circuit board which would made it easier to burn off the melted tabs, but
steady hand & good light I avoided doing that.
I mounted mine different than Ten Tec. I did not want to go though, if I have
to in the future, to remove the melted tabs which destroys the plastic mount.
So I placed meter on mount, which by the way has two tabs on front that factory
melts also to hold meter on mount, & pushed through circuit board. With face
plate on I could see that it was pressing against those two front unmelted
tabs. Since the meter had to be pushed pretty hard on those taps I decided to
just trim them enough so they would just rest against the face plate. I used a
Dremel tool to trim 1/16 inch off tabs so face plate now lightly pushes against
meter mount holding to circuit board. If I run into this sticking problem again
it will be easy to remove meter & clean or replace.
Meter is $4.65 & mount is 60 cents.
Thanks guys for your help!
73,
Reed W4JZ
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