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Radio Road Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio! |
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Radio Road Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio! |
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In Reply to: Re: my 10B experiences sound like... posted by Marantzguy on November 28, 2006 at 17:28:23:
Based on your post about the 10B optocouplers a while back, I got up the "courage" to deconstruct one the the dual versions I'd saved from repairing my 10B. I was hoping that the failure mode was simply a worn out Ne2 bulb so rejuvination would be easy. Instead what I found was a couple of intermittent CdS photocells.The intermittency was caused by CdS cell leads that had been pulled loose from the cell internally. They were easily rotated and could be pulled right out of the cell with little force. I attribute this condition to the way the optocouplers were constructed. Internal construction had the cells pulled up tight by their leads to a circular plug of dense foam. The foam plug assy was then inserted into the can and potting compound was poured over the foam to seal it. It appears that the potting compound would shrink causing the cell leads to be strained. Since the foam had no give to it, the leads eventually pulled loose from the cell.
I thought that replacing the cells would be easy but I was wrong. Clairex used to mfg a wide variety of CdS cells and Mouser used to carry them. Apparently Clairex got out of the business and there are few mfgrs remaining and with limited variety. I read somewhere that CdS cell mfg was in the process of being phased out worlwide because Cd is a hazardous material and electronic components utilizing it are probably not ROHAS compliant.
Anyway, next stop was Radio Shack per your post. RS does (did?) carry a pkg of "assorted" experimenter grade CdS cells but only a 1 or 2 cells out of ~ 10 in the pkg seemed to have the proper characteristics. I ended up having to buy something like 8 or 10 pkgs to get 5 usable cells. At this point I was beginning to wonder if the project was worth the effort an put the whole thing on the shelf for another day.
After all this work in tracking down fast vanishing materials to recreate an outdated technology I think the real answer is finding some way of adapting a modern, off-the-shelf opto-isolator with an FET output. I probably ought to get on this sooner rather than later because I don't think there will be much FM programming worthy of a decent FM tuner around much longer.
As a parting aside, I've never experienced the "loss-of-detection" condition so may 10B users report. Was the cause ever tracked down or is it just one of those quirks of a legenday consumer product and I've been lucky?
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Follow Ups
- Re: my 10B experiences sound like... - Steve O 17:07:07 11/29/06 (1)
- Re: my 10B experiences sound like... - Marantzguy 14:55:05 11/30/06 (0)
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