Crew,
I own five of these switches purchased over a period of sevral years from
various dealers, and have had at least two failures. In one, the #4
position simply didn't work. I opened it up to find that it could not
possibly work -- the wafer that was supposed to mate with the rotating part
was too short! I discovered a problem this weekend in a second switch this
weekend -- the #1 position doesn't make contact. When it was newer, I could
fiddle with it and get it to mate. Now even that doesn't work. I opened it
up and found no obvious problem, except that the two contacts didn't meet
parallel to each other. Other positions in both switches work fine.
These switches come with labels over the rear chassis screws warning you
not to remove them, lest parts fly out and self destruct. And, of course,
doing so voids the warranty. But, I ask, what good is a warranty on a
product that costs a third of what you paid for it to ship back for repair,
and is void if you bother to carefully open it up to check for obvious
problems? After all, we are hams, not CBers. With both of the switches that
have problems, the labels were intact, indicating that they had not been
opened.
Two failures out of five is pretty bad, especially for such a simple
product, and inexcusable when one of those failures HAD to have been found
in final test (if there WAS final test). When a group of us were using
switches like these on a California QSO Party county DXpedition to switch
antennas and filters, our host, N6RNO indicated that at least one of his
switches had a problem that he hadn't figured out yet. Is this isolated to
us? Anyone else seen these problems?
73,
Jim K9YC
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