Hi again,
And thanks to the many of you who responded. Yes,
it seems in general agreement that the RF mixer board
coil, L3 which was open, was the culprit. Also that
this most probably did fail during the vibration, occasional
jiggle and shock of a several thousand mile trip, plus
many machine and human handlings!
That is just the risk one takes in having an older rig
shipped a long ways.
The seller was very helpful to me through this ordeal;
he even called me once by phone! Am sure the rig
was operating to his satisfaction when he put it out
for sale. It was packed by a Mailboxes shop, all
of which I paid for. In fact, the seller was the first
to call Paul Clinton at TT service for ideas on where
to look for the possible cause of the problem, then
sent to me Clinton's phone number so that I could
describe the problem and my attempts to isolate
to him in detail.
I did not intend for the tone of my post to place blame
or doubt on the integrity of the seller! I wrote the piece
as much for myself to print out and keep with all the
other paper work about the rig and manuals. Also
to post to solicit which among the many fixes done
by Clinton was the most probable source of the
problem upon my first firing up the little unit. Of
course, I had suspected the RF Mixer board
from the outset as a possible problem area, along
with the thought that the problem could be on the
Crystal Filter board (the vertical one).
I believe that the unit would have worked just fine,
if not absolutely perfectly, for the seller with the
other many items Paul repaired in addition to the
open L3 coil on the RF mixer board. I sold a
Kenwood TS-950SDX several years ago. The
fellow who bought it was back at me in no time
with a great long list of "wrongs" with the rig, of
which I was completely unaware! The audio SSB
monitor did not work, on certain bands, as I recall.
Well, I never used the monitor for SSB. The
built-in ATU was slow/noisy; this probably built
up over time, and I didn't notice, anyway, I
used an external tuner and much of the time
had the internal tuner OFF. He had a shop measure
the sensitivity of the radio on several bands: it was
not up to spec, etc., etc. The outer case had several
blems -- on a side, near some of the knobs -- my
vision never saw these. I learned a lot from that
experience!
I wound up refunding his money, of course, and paid
to have him ship the radio not immediately back to
me, but to the Kenwood service center for fix up
and repair. There is more to that story, of course,
and it was eventually sold to another, and was
shipped directly to him by Kenwood from the
Service Center. I even paid to have Kenwood
install a new front panel to deal with blems I
had never seen.
If I ever sell another one of my rigs, believe I will send
it first to the service facility, and have it shipped
from there to the new owner, hi! In fact that will
be a sale contingency: when a buyer appears,
I will tell him first the rig goes in for check up and
repair as needed, then on to him.
I don't want to go through the frustration of such
an experience as either seller or buyer again.
73, Jim, KH7M
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