I don't know about your QTH, but I'd bet that radio would be on eBay here in the states in no time at all! And I doubt he/she would mention your repair. Thanks for the video, Peter. I really enjoy watching your troubleshooting skills.
Hi Peter. Great troubleshooting skills on this one. Very well done my friend. Just got home for the first time today by land vehicle. All the flood water is gone and roads are clear. So much cleaning to do here. Was taking a break and watched your video :-)Take care my friend!
Hi Buddy, I'm honestly happy that you are back home and I hope that it is "only"(and that can already painful enough) cleaning and not too much damage you have to mange! Take care my friend!! Wish I could help you somehow..
Thanks Peter very informative I have a 910h also with tx problem on uhf and vhf i think the fault is 2sk2975 driver which controls both frequency 23cm works fine , i also tried icom and they said the same thing about service etc anyway very good video has helped me too thank you cheers Harm
Ein wahrer Alptraum. Icom Reparaturen scheinen zu deinen Lieblingsaufgaben zu zählen lieber Peter. Ich bewundere jedes mal deine Geduld und deine Fachkenntnis. Hut ab und 73, Ralf
Hall Ralf, ja das sind wirklich Alptraum Fehler, aber Icom Reparaturen gehören in vielerlei Hinsicht sicher nicht zu meinen Lieblingsaufgaben hihi. Danke für Dein Feed-Back 73
Intermittent faults can drive you nuts Peter, nice to show that it can not always be corrected and found for sure. I was glad to see that you did a reflow on the IC, I bet that may have done the job, time will tell.
Yeah you are right Howard intermittent faults are the most worse you can have and it is tre that sometimes this kind of faults stay hidden... Thanks for stepping in 73
Intermittent faults can be a pain to locate, but the reflow certainly seemed to cure the mystery fault as mystery faults can lead you a merry dance well done again peter :)
Great Peter !!! Thanks for this lesson, you are right, intermittent cases are worst !!! But let me us about this repair, very very nice. Thanks a lot, 73s de IW0HEX Pasquale.
Thank you for your experience shared with us...seems that ICOM have that kind of problem in some radios, or this owner have a little bit of bad luck, i hope that you have solved this problem at 100%. '73 ^_^
Very like the issue is in the IC itself. I have the same behavior by bond wire faults, the IC works when touching with one probe and the error disappers. This is temerature independing.
I like your approach to the problem Peter, you isolated the fault in half buy disconnecting the PLL board from the PA. Nice job when watching I was thinking cold solder joint. Not the case then internal chip fault at certain temperature range. Have you taken a external temperature of the chip itself and compared it to the other chip. One other possibility is in the PCB layers itself, having an internal layer fault do to thermal expansion. Is there any high heat component under the board in that area causing the fault. Well I hope you catch it Peter for the sake of the customer and for the ICOM service reps. Great video as always look forward to the next one. Cheers
I believe I would remove the shield on the secondary PLL and do a direct comparison of the supply voltage on pin 44. That should clear up the discrepancy on the print compared to the actual article.
What technique did you use to reflow the IC? Did you just touch each pin with a soldering iron, or did you use a hot air gun? Did you add solder, or just reheat?
In cases like this I do it pin by pin under my microscope as sometime you can see which pin makes problems with this technique. I use Flux and new solder as well. 73
1st IF :=10.695mhz 2nd IF:=455khz LO:=10.240mhz if no 455KHZ then the LO is bad can you get 10.240mhz from one of the pins on the synthesizer chip and use that to drive both mixers?
Great analysis Peter, I really enjoyed your video. Which supplier do you trust for your cable adapters and connectors used in your test lab? I recently had several SMA to UHF connectors that were causing me trouble on my measurements and I now want to replace them. Thanks, 73, Kostas.
Another reason I've never bought any ICOM so far is that their technical department can't fix their own radios! There was also another video before with the same problem happening on a different ICOM. Also, for some weird reason I've noticed that ICOM radios have too many ribbon tapes around, which are very sensitive to faults and nearly impossible to replace or repair if something goes wrong.
Hi Kostas, well for HF you can use cheaper adapters but when it comes to VHF and higher I trust in HP/ Keysight, R&S, Rosenberger and such..Hope that helps 73
In looking at the schematic and IC position where it matches the upper side it does appear pin 44 should be VDD. It also has a bypass cap to ground exactly where you would expect one to be. IC chips can do very rare and intermittent behavior when one of the power pins is left open and it shouldn't be. It also looks that if it is VDD it maybe missing the 100p on that side where the others have it The PCB drawing in the service manual also shows a common VDD tie between pin 11 and 44 and 6 like the schematic does Pin 43 is the clock out to the connector isn't it? Not surprising if that VDD is open and shouldn't be that would be the power pin allowing bad things to happen. If it were mine I would tie 44 to VDD and try to place a 100p piggyback on top of the 0.01 and might even assume it would never happen again. This looks like a PCB layout design error they found after a few hundred radios started coming back in the original warranty period on an early revision. My best guess says the original pin 44 wasn't marked VDD in the original PCB layout. Does the service manual and schematic have the revision marked compared to your test subject?
Hi John, yes I agree but what I don't understand is the fact that we don't have many similar problems in the field. This radio is already 10 years old and thus we should have seen it many times before. And even if this fault has been identified by Icom very early and a revision has been done very quickly so that not many radios with this problem are on the market why did Icom not a modification to this particular board and quit all problems for the future?? I mean this radio has been 3 time in service within 10 years?? Is it possible that ICOM don't know this problem?? Thanks for comment and watching 73
Yes that would be the right approach if I would know which junction is intermittent open...but you can't dee it even not with a microscope as it might be inside the layer.. 73
Peter you're the best, and this is one of the best videos I have seen. No one else has ever made a detailed video like you have, Great Super Job. All Hams owe you a billion Thanks, forever in debt and grateful to you. You bless people with knowledge no else will do. so happy there are people like you in this world. Thanks
Icom i bet stopped making the pcb 6 months before they discontinued the model, that way when a problem like this shows up, they just say can't fix, go spend $4,000 on a new IC-9100
@@TRXLab well if I had one of them to be repaired, the cost from the US would cost to much. lol hi hi. Looks like your a great repair person. Keep up the great work.
Hi Peter, This is one of the best videos. It teaches trouble shooting, how to think about the problem, how to choose which path that “may” be the best, and it shows what happens in real life. Excellent. 73
icom got a black eye from this particular job. bad boys really. good try, and I have the feeling you fixed it now, hopefully, but will not know for a year. jeez. if not a board, then the ic. jeez.
ᗒ╬ᗕ1112223333111ᗒ╬ᗕ anything can fail no matter what it is if man makes it.ICOM has been far more dependable than any other brand & I will continue buying and using them as long as they don’t have a touch screen.
I used to have the same trouble when fixed ic-910 with model number about 2000, i.e. it was rather old. My problem was on front panel board. As I managed to figure it out, the chip leg lost constant contact with the plate. In my case the problem had resulted to display twinkling. After weldering all got fine! In your situation I'm sure was smth like that.
Well done Peter....It really hacks me off about Icom...I have heard so many stories about them not wanting to do customer repairs and it really puts me off purchasing their sets.Kenwood good Yaesu good It seems all Icom want to do is force the customer to re-purchase.Cheers for taking the time to do this for us.
charlieoscar09 YAESU & Kenwood sell plenty of GARBAGE so I will keep my shack full of ICOM gear.I have owned plenty of Garbage built by YAESU & Kenwood.
I have the same 910H that has all the upgrades to include the high-stability oscillator you see on the PLL board along with the 1.2GHz module. Were you able to determine why the SHF module became so hot as that doesn't seem to be normal; perhaps the high heat is what caused a micro fracture along one of the DDS IC pins. TNX for the operation lay down, I made some notes and put them into my 910H binder for future reference. 73 - Dino KL0S
Hi Dino, yeah the high stability oscillator is installed too, didn't mention it in the video...Well I would not say the SHF module is too hot but it has it's temperature and considering that it is fully covering the main board I doubt the the airflow is optimal.. All really foreboding to a micro crack on the pcb and the temperature around the DDS IC is quite hight and additional to all the PLL IC gets that hot that you can't touch it but that is known and normal for this IC. Thanks for stepping by 73
A little surprising with the complaints in other comments about Icom service; I had my 910H repaired (bad driver transistor in the UHF PA chain) by the Icom Service Center in Michigan here in the U.S. and they repaired it in a timely manner, but I'm sure many may have very different experiences.
Dino Papas ICOM Service is AWESOME and has even repaired a radio for me for FREE that was out of warranty and they paid the return shipping as well.I’ll take that kind of service any time.
