Very nice story, Butch.

Not only is it informative, but it drives home the point that those of us
who have good spouses really need to appreciate them for who they are.

Maybe there's a bit of a Thanksgiving theme coming through here, but it's
something I always try to be mindful of.

Regarding my Astron RS35, I think I'm going to have one of our more
technicallly-inclined local club members look at mine with me, so we can
maybe figure out what might be going wrong.  I just think it's behaving a
bit more erradically than it should be.

Tom Behler: KB8TYJ


-----Original Message-----
From: For blind ham radio operators [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Butch Bussen
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2015 7:43 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Kenwood PS53 Power Supply Manual

I have occasionally had to repair astron supplies.  One particular  time
comes to mind.  It was the day before my 60th Birthday and I was living in
Las Vegas at the time.  A good friend of mine, Fred, K9GAJ, had lived in
Vegas for several years and we enjoyed each other's company helping each
other with repairs, antennas and so forth.  Unfortunately for me, he had
retired and moved to New Mexico a couple years before this incident.  We had
a near lightning strike and my 35 amp astron died.  I did have a spair, but
kept grumbling, "I wish Fred was here, he'd help me fix this thing."  I'm a
good trouble shooter, but not good at soldering on pc boards.

The next day was my 60th birthday and Libbie told me she might be late from
work as she had a meeting.  I never gave it a thought, although I should
have, she never stayed late.  Anyhow, she came home at normal time. 
A couple minutes later, there was a knock at the door and I figured u p s or
some body.  I opened the door and Fred said "happy birthday."  I just stood
there.  Finally Libbie asked me if I was going to let him in.  One heck of a
surprise for my birthday which Libbie had put together.  All the time I was
grumbling about Fred not being there any more, she just smiled as she knew
he'd be at my door the next day.  Hard to believe she's been gone 5 years
this December.  She was always doing cool stuff like that, which is why I
miss her so much.  Well, we began working on the supply and kept running in
circles.  Turned out to be a simple fix once we found it. 
We quickly determined the driver transister was bad.  We replaced that, and
still no output.  There is a series resister from the emiter of the driver,
a ten ohm as I recall, to the base of the pass transisters.  Fred misread it
as a thousand ohms and oddly enough, that is what it checked with an ohm
meter.  I should have caught on that that was way to high a value for where
it was in the circuit.  Once we replaced it with a ten ohm, the supply was
back to normal.  We both should have caught that one much soonner than we
did.  He kept misreading the colors and I kept thinking 1 k was correct.

Those supplies are fairly trouble free, but lightning or a power lline spike
can get the 723 or a transister.  If I remember right, the driver was bad,
but we totally kept overlooking that pesky resister.



73
Butch
WA0VJR
Node 3148
Wallace, ks.