#128 Basic RF Repair Series TEST GEAR

hello everyone what everyone is doing fine I wanted to start a series of videos on basic electronic troubleshooting started with something basic like the CB radio that belongs to a friend of mine which is a truck driver and he'd also a ham operator but uh his radios quit on them he wanted me to take a look at it and you know it's already several things that I see wrong with the radio you know Demeter stuff does not work digits out in the display and the radio does not transmit nor does it receive so you know the first thing that you need is knowledge and that's basic electronic skills so you know if you already have those basic skills and just set of videos will probably be you know helpful to you to move along to start working with a little bit of RF repair in the radio field but also along with basic skills you need equipment to work on stuff well I get tons of emails all the time asking you know I'm going to start walking on radios what do I need again the first is those basic skills without those you need to go on and look at some videos on running electronics you know me and Mike had talked about this several times where people always asking that and you know they ask before they even pick the skills but the next thing you'll need is just some basic test equipment now you know on my bench yeah as you know just tons of equipment here just don't own this one bench alone you know not counting the other benches but test equipment can be very expensive just look at a few things you know just basic handheld multimeters and in RF power we also find that you know analog leaders or or good choice to have around to to look at picking up stuff you know even one of these cheap $10 meters here will help you in testing several circuits you know and you know then we have the game deck and a few other bench meters back into volt meters you know all that stuff is good now Dave and a pretty little bit vote log just did a teardown review of a nice cheap multimeter and you can actually pick them up for under 25 bucks banggood has that exact same meet I think us under another name we're just under 25 dollars to this you know it's not bad you have so another thing you know is frequency catalyst you know this is the main frequency counter I use most of the time and it's a leader I also have a timber and a 1801 B and K cuz I use quite often also and all the other bench I have a Heathkit and it'll be in K cheaper up on a megahertz meter or frequency counter and you know not go online and start looking and those things are not cheap I'm seeing just 1801 it's still bringing anywhere from 75 to 100 bucks lots of different things that you can look at it bad you can pick some bum up pretty cheap but you know you might have to work on them so in this case you know it's just saying that you wanted to start troubleshooting this radio let's say that you're honest thing that you really have is a voltmeter I walked me in on the dummy load you know but you've got a radio here that has no transmit no receive we notice radio has been in a hard environment because it's been riding around in the truck you know basically the first thing you would check is the ten-point to 40 megahertz reference oscillator you know and in this particular radio it's mounted right here and if you had a frequency counter you know you can come to the back and check across it and just see afar you have your ten point to 40 but you know to go out and buy a small signal generator to say you wanted to test 455 kilohertz also later could be bad that can also stop the radio from working so you would need to inject 455 kilohertz into radio and again you don't have the equipment to do that well there is some alternatives on buying cheaper equipment that can get the job done then we all remember moddable the tester here that came from my van good as a kid we put together you know this is a cheaper device gets the job done for testing huh transistors induct those resistors you know encoders all kinds of stuff capacitors gives an ESR meter you know it it does a real good job it was very cheap you know under 20 bucks so you know this is a I'll be honest with you I use this thing a lot or checking various components of stuff it's just hard to be you know and there's not a lot of money tied up in it and you know you can go out and buy and just an ESR meter for a hundred bucks you know and it's just an ESR meter it doesn't test all the other stuff so you got you know you just getting started you don't know how far you really want to go into this you know sometimes buying this cheap equipment is the way to go here in front of me we have a FY 3200 s dual channel arbitrary function signal generator counter and can this stuff be used in basic radio repair we will look at that here in the video and we'll see what no banggood sent me this for your charge just you know I'll have to add it into a video and leave a link down to it below so just follow along and we'll do this series probably a 1/2 of a month on basic radio troubleshooting now this is a goes up to 24 megahertz it comes with a total small CD and you can also download this online it comes with a USB cable so you can hook it to your computer and you can program your own presets in and it comes with two BNC two alligator probes that can be used with it so stick with me we'll go through looking at this radio and how we can use this in troubleshooting a you know just a basic standard radio with a no transmit/receive problem you know but one good thing if you want to uh check through to see an audio circuit and we will sweep an audio circuit to see how it looks on a scope but say you do have a scope you know you want to check that you can go ahead and tell this thing your sweep and get a start quick let's see we have our 1 killer hurt infix I got it set to 20 kilohertz woof set this parenting books we set it down to one second because the output cable and we'll talk to run so now we can look like that on the scope and see a sweeping across that area that we are programmed in so you know this could be helpful for injecting into a microphone or looking at a man rarity of a single side band transmission you know that can help you or you know studying functions like that so I'm not going to get real detailed into it I'm just showing you the things you can use it for but you know in this particular case right here we want to check out on 10.2 40 megahertz reference oscillator so always window at comments liftoff two probes here BNC and two alligator clips and we just want to put in here to the input and we're going to switch our generator over to count I always going to do is ground and we can come down here to where the ten point two forty signal should be and we'll clip onto it and looking here at the counter we have zero so you know that tells me there is no 10-point 240 so on claim I'm going to do is come down here with a crystal and bridge across where the original crystal assaulted them and we'll look at the counter and see if anything changes and wish over ten point two thirty eight megahertz so this crystal is just a little bit load you know that that's close enough so so simply right there you know we used to counter in this piece of equipment to check this radio and we already found that our 10.2 40 megahertz rhythmic crystal is bad so our very first step now is to go ahead and pour this 10.2 40 crystal out you know we place it with a good one so I'll go ahead and let me I sold it to heat up we'll go ahead and D soldier the old crystal what was interesting as soon as I with the desalted this thing the whole team came out and was gone we see that one pen is still sticking up but other pen is completely gone we have to disorder the ground strap on the top and check that out what do you see on the bottom of that crystal glued so that glue has eat the leg right off that Chris where to go and that's why this right here quit working we'll take so long good question and this was just a spare that was in the boat did y'all in there sit in there Glantz trip back home crystal sup ok then we'll just uh do a little quick test here using all function generators counter and you can see we now have a signal of ten point two thirty eight megahertz so not bad we just verify radio now has transmitted and all your five way just do it on very test with all IFR [Music] okay we have the radio good generating signal into the radio and there is no receive we know the leader is bad so I've hooked up my little law indicator box and we perceive them meter is wiggling but also you know there's no audio output I've also noticed that when transmitted you can see that we are generating a signal you see this waveform going out but when I go to transmit on the radio we can say we have a lot of noise being produced on our transmit signal so the radio still has some other issues and that transmit here with the chameleon raising to transmit showing rows of RF output power so yes still a lot of problems in fact I think I have another cup of 25 s in real good shape they can we'll just give it to and I'm going to keep this radio just for doing some basic videos and troubleshooting skills on it so as you can see the FY 3200 s Monson generator is a pretty handy little tool to have and you know the prices they are very in you know 50 to 60 bucks it's you know a little bit more than not what we're looking at spending but you know still for the price of it with the all the functions that it has again you know the leader lfg 1300 s only goes up to two megahertz it's a great piece of equipment works like a charm but again you know you're limited to two two megahertz also this thing is going on eBay anywhere from a hundred to three hundred and ninety nine dollars you know frequency counter going to read on the leader frequency counter here is 250 megahertz I'm seeing them for you know a hundred bucks on eBay but you know you can't beat it you know fifty bucks or so for this little device is it's not bad at all it's very handy little piece of equipment especially you know if you need to produce several things you know plus it's to channel output and you can select me the channel so if you want in you know sweet one range into an audio circuit you know and then sweep a separate range into a different part of the audio circuit you got two channels here to work with and play with you know I'll leave a link down below to this function generator and you can check it out for yourself then for the little radio let's say I must swap it out with a good radio and give it to him that will make him very happy and we'll use this in part of our troubleshooting the series that will start this is a poly Goodwin because like I say it's been rode for several years around the big trucks and there's no telling you know what all we'll find inside of this thing and then when we go through this we'll probably move up to something like a cup of 148 single-sideband unit let's start getting to a little single side being troubleshooting and stuff but yeah I think this will be a pretty good candidate for troubleshooting with you know so again I got so many emails asking you know what people just wanting to get into work on radio and again you can't beat CB radio as a starting platform to learn the basics of RF electronics because you you know you can pick these things up cheap if you blow it up in the end you've got some pause and if you fix it well you've run a few things you know and as far as test equipment I'll be doing adding in several different products from banggood and they are sending me these at no charge they are not paying me to advertise for them to just send an equipment to me to use in videos I will be leaving a link down below to this function generator if you like to check it out and I also will have links below to my website if you want discuss this and also a link to my patreon page if you'd like to support me on patreon but I believe that you know basic is all you need to start working on radios again you must have a little bit electronic background and if you're not up to date on that I suggest you go on line and there's several tutorials on YouTube and on several webpages you know just google them you'll find out anyway if you found the video useful leave your comments down below check out VR show more tab below and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: The Radio Shop

Views: 41,101

Keywords: banggood, function generator, rf repair, test geat, test equipment, ham radio repair, troubleshoot, electronics, theradioshop, the radio shop

Id: aWttqS7KqDw

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2017