Nice work Peter just shows you a small error connecting to a power supply can damage a radio at least it wasn’t permanently damaged.. I’ve got a ft817 I use portable brilliant little radio….. I always enjoy watch your repair videos👍👍👍
I have been a Electronics Technician for over 35 years, I would put a jumper wire on the copper foil instead of a blob of solder. But none the less the butcher that worked on it before should get into another line work,. Nice videos Peter I enjoy watching your work. Thank you.
RfDave,,i work at a Motorola/Kenwood 2 way dealer. i myself am a bench tech. and I've never seen such a cobbled up mess. it's beyond obvious whoever worked on this radio don't have a clue what there doing. just wonder if they were responsible for lifting/burning the trace(s). or the owner who RP'd the radio did it in. (KD8EFJ)
I made the exact same mistake 3-4 years ago. But instead of the simple problem your client had, my ft-817nd blew a transistor on the front panel instead. I tried to fix this but burned a trace and lost an smd capacitor in the process so I relented and sent the radio to be repaired by a professional. Haha. Thanks for the video, really enjoyed the repair.
Good job as always Peter.At the end of the video I was amazed at how much power was coming out of the little 817.I also noticed the voltage reading on the display was different to the 13.8 volts from your psu so definitely someone has gone into the service menu and god only knows what else has been messed with.😯73.Ian.G7HFS
Hi Peter another intersting video, I remember back in the early CB day a so called Tech had those same lack of skills he damaged more than he repaired :-(
Thanks for the great video. Great job. This error happened to me too. It was caused by an unwanted short circuit at the input of the external power supply. The TCVR was powered up and running on an internal battery. This can happen quite easily in the field. Don't use Crocodile Electric Clips, but use proper connectors 🙂
Dip your solder wick in flux first. It will then suck up the solder much more completely. Made all the difference when I first started using solder wick.
Say Peter on my Chrysler car I am going to try to repair the Bluetooth module so my wife can use her phone in the car. This radio is fairly easy to test by seeing it's reception decibel and or transmit. The module has a standard USB power supply so I will attempt the fix then see if my wife's phone will pair with it for the test while it is removed from the vehicle. I wondered if you had repaired items like this. The problem for me is no schematic is available and will have to noodle it. Thanks for your videos.
What a mess!!! I hate working on stuff that other people have had a go on. Missing screws, wrong fuses, even wrong valves (tubes - I'm English!). I even worked on a lighting dimmer pack that had a large area of copper track blown away because a fuse had been bridged with a bit of thick wire.
at 5:17 the diode beside the cap. have a bad joint ... it is the protection diode ... it could be damaged too and have a short .... another nice video ... keep the good work
Piece of simple advice from a Ham: If you laid down the money for a FT-817, when applying power to it, MAKE SURE the red wire is connected to batt + and black wire to batt - !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It amazes me sometimes the things we see.
I own a Yaesu FT-817ND myself and was very interested to see what was inside to cause this problem. When you showed the closeup of the board, I was aghast at what looked like someone had "butchered" the board. The point of the open in the trace appeared, to me, to be where someone had used way too much force with a soldering iron and removed that part of the trace that way...but whatever the cause, it was indeed open. One thing that concerned me a bit was after you cleaned the board, removed extra solder, and then proceeded to power it up, I was worried about several places where under your magnifier it appeared there were tiny balls of solder between a pad and the ground plane. Must not have been though since it worked so well. I am so happy to have found someone else in addition to "Mr. Carlson's Lab" that makes intelligent, thoughtful, and educational videos on electronics. Keep up the excellent work! Do you work on Vacuum Tube equipment as well? I have a love for old equipment that uses vacuum tubes and very much enjoy watching videos on restoring them. Again, keep up the excellent work!
Exactly this foil burned out of my 817after an unatented reverse polarity. If i let me a notes : in transmit, the voltage drop 2100 mV on the pre-filters, inductors including the dc-jack, and a foil traces. This can be observed another 817's.
Thank you very much for make this video. It's really helpful. I always learn new thing from your videos. I'm newbie to ham radio and electronics. 73! 4S6MNJ
Weird. I bought one of those recently and after it came , i plugged it in tried to run on BUT THEN I SAW SOMETHING YOU SEE ONLY IN NIGHTMARES + - TERMINALS WERE SWITCHED I was really scared in that moment, so i unplugged it and switched the PSU leads, and FT817ND came to life. I mean wow, in Yaesu they improved it or something
Sehr interessant Peter. Ich nehme an der Vorgänger hatte vielleicht kein Mikroskop. Das ist aber inzwischen unverzichtbar, wenn man SMD-Bauteile bis 0204 oder sogar noch kleiner löten muss. Und die Augen werden auch nicht besser ;-) Freue mich auf weitere Videos von Dir in 2019 und bleib Gesund!
Hi Leo, ja wharscheinlich hatte er kein Mikroskop und du hast recht ohne die richtige Ausrüstung kann man diese Geräte nicht mehr reparieren..Danke fürs vorbeischauen !
I wouldn't want to go back to that radio shop if that's the quality of soldering he does. It worried me that I might connect an external battery with reverse polarity on my 817 and h/b radio. I use an FQP47P06 MOSFET for reverse polarity protection. It can't switch on with reverse voltage and there's very little voltage drop across it. Bill, G4GHB.
Peter, good work. It´s always cruel to see, what so called repair shops are doing and that they don´t find such faults, which can be located easily by using Ohm´s law...hi. But one comment: I would have taken a short piece of wire (AgCu) instead of the big solder blob.
Thanks Stefan yeah you are right there are so many so called repair shops outside that so can get scarred...Regarding the solder blob I have never experienced any problem by doing it this way. I agree that you exactly need to know where you can do and where you should do it different. In this case it is a lower power radio and the solder bridge is very short. That means low resistor and almost no voltage drop over the bridge and thus no heat caused by the bridge. Additional to that radio is not installed to a car so no vibrations. In any other case I would have done it as you proposed...73
it may "only be a 6 watt radio" but the efficiency of solid state xmtrs is maybe 50% so that's 12 watts or almost an amp and the RX demands almost an amp ( digital circuits are energy hogs) so now you have almost 2 amps going through the solder blob... and in FM mode that is 100% duty cycle.. so a good solid blob is just what you wanted ! as somebody else said, this radio wants a crow bar diode ! and a more careful owner.
I was just thinking the first guy who got it never even bothered to look at it…lol happens a lot that, they put it to one side, get busy, forget about it until they are my there’d by the owner then just throw it back at them…first attempt would of been the owner, failed then thought sod it, bite the bullet and pay for a professional fix.
Hi Peter once again thanks for a great video as always worth from the learning perspective of mine. Though I realy would like you to have a look at mine Yaesu FT847 please. Kind regards PD2AHQ, The Hague
@@TRXLab the diode will prevent the reverse polarity to charge the main capacitor in opposite polarity too and not to destroy any other tracks by sorting .... by all means you need also a fuse at the cord …. and if its not there if the YAESU is wrong or the owner cut it off the cord..... Thank you TRX you are very professional...
@@nikosalexakis3494 It already has a reverse polarity protection diode in the rig, but it requires a fuse in the cord to prevent damage to the rig. I understand you're asking why not put a forward polarity diode in series, and the reason is because it causes quite a lot of voltage drop which would severely limit how much of the battery you could effectively use before the voltage dropped too low.
.... "I do not have time to fix it" ..... The sentence went on for sure. "..... bring it to Peter" ;-) On the other hand, it is also good that he did not fix it ..... who knows what else would have come out. Sometimes I would really like to know who offers such a service ..... Well done Peter, it would have surprised me if you had not got it healed again :-) 73 Bernd
I am stunned the owner would have thought that turning up the power on the FT817ND to 20 watts was a good way to go for more power out, power is cheap as his next set of finals. I suspect it was the owner who had more to do with the radio being in the shop than just not putting the right polarity into the rig, no your limitations and it will be a cheaper way to live and it may even give you a longer life hi. Richard vk2ual
Another case of "Look what the golden screwdriver has done!" Another great repair!! Peter, do you charge extra when people take it to a chop-shop and then they bring it to you to fix what the chop-shop did? The owner is very lucky, the 817 is a wonderful radio but it can be very expensive to repair!
with that big blob of solder on the ground power input, if the radio is ever plugged back in the wrong polarity, it might blow way more farther since the blob of solder will never break now... I feel it's like replacing a fuse with a nail... also I find that strange that a shop would abandon repair for only a cut trace...
Good work on this burn victim, Peter. Sometimes i wish that the companies just put a diode and a microfuse with socket in there. For this QRP radio you can choose small values with tiny space, and were a talking about 3 cents. I don´t like the power jack style..kinda cheap.. But anyways, the radio is now looking good. 73 de Olaf
Kleine Ergänzung: Gerade diese billigen DC-Buchsen verführen gerne dazu, mal eben ein altes Kabel von einem Restenetzteil abzuschneiden, um sich einen 12V Anschluss zu basteln. Diese sind nur selten schön SW/w markiert oder deutlich geriffelt auf der +Seite, und dann ist es schnell passiert beim anklemmen....
A TINY bit of reverse engineering would do wonders here. I see a couple of excellent suggestions about adding components, and also saw in the video no apparent use of any methods of parts verification either before or after your obvious repair. I would HOPE that ALL the circuitry was given a thorough check for reverse polarity damage... etc. de KQ2E
He verified the radio transmits and receives properly. The display comes on and the controls work. What more do you want him to reverse engineer and check? The reverse polarity diode obviously did its job to protect the radio.
Hi Peter, Another easy repair. Wonder why the other shop missed that break in the circuit. Another RU-vidr BBI would call that solder job chicken poop. 73 WB3BJU
Hi Peter, You have to wonder about some repair shops, I have seen in the past a shop repair where they replaced a blown fuse with a strand of wire this was on a customers TV, and given back to the customer like that, however you took this radio and it's working now, I wonder how long it will be, before it comes back for a New set of final's, and to be put back to 5 Watts, some people don't seem to understand this power subject and fascination with more power = further distance, I wonder how much of that 20 watts is coming back down the coax, maybe 15 watts of it. 73's Paul
You are right Paul it is scarring what we see and your example is additional dangerous too...Well the 20Watt will get out as long the SWR is okay but the final stage is not designed for that power...That is one reason why the 817 owner have a blown final club LOL Have a nice Sunday 73
If you want power from a low power rig wouldn't a boot make much more sense? It would to me at least. Use the several watts as a driver to what ever out you need and buy. Though I don't understand buying low power in the first place if you want power. Luckily I was taught early when I first hit cb by some friendly amateurs who also spoke on cb about wavelengths, swr, antenna matching, antenna types and so much more and it really sunk in fast. However far too many are clueless. I've had great antennas off just stripped coax on magmounts, metal coat hangers etc with good swr. I've only once run a radio without matching (12w) and there were reasons but only for short overs and little use so touch wood never burned a final yet.
I see this video was from 3 years ago. Have it been back to your Lab to replace the finals the user burned up after running the radio at 20 watts? Only a matter of time.
I’ve seen you use Flux Off in the past after soldering. What are you using with the cotton swab to clean that mess up? Is it Flux Off, alcohol, or something else. Thank you for making these informative and interesting videos. - Phil
Hello Peter, That burned out trace looked interesting. I believe it is the main ground line coming from the DC jack, and I expect it to be somewhat thick. Which it is, except for the point where it was burnt which was quite thin and in the shape of a plus (+) sign. That makes me think it was deliberately made that way to act as a fuse (stupid idea to make a PCB trace fuse, I know but that is what it seems). So, IMHO, rather than bridging it with a strong solder blob, it may have been a better idea to use a suitable rated SMD resetable PTC fuse in there? That way, if the owner does the same reverse voltage mistake again, it will be somewhat protected. Best regards from Ankara, Turkey, TA2AWX
Well Bora, if the intention was to use the trace as a fuse we should find this idea in the service manual which we don't. It was rather more the missing fuse in the power cord to protect the radio.. Thanks for comment. 73
@@TRXLab Yes, I know, the idea is rather stupid. Maybe I saw the trace wrong on the video, it seemed like a thinner "+" in the middle of a thicker trace. I was just curious. Thanks for the reply.👍
My FT-817 is really old. I think I bought it in 2000 or 2001. The display just started flickering and there is a corresponding noise in the RX. The last time this happened I switched the LiPo switch to ON/OFF on the bottom and it seemed to stop (but not sure if that was the actual issue). A couple of days ago, it was doing the same thing on external power. I am thinking since it is intermittent that possibly an old cap is leaking or something similar. Have you come across this?
