failing power supply?

[turbosat]

Sometime during the night, my orig Viewsat Ultra appears to have lost its life. I had it in the den for mom's horse-racing enjoyment, was working fine yesterday. We had some thunderstorms about 1am but wasn't any really close lightning or loud thunder, but something must've happened to it during the night. No display this morning, front panel leds flash and wiggle very dimly a few times on powerup, then go out completely. I'm no expert but that sounds like a power supply dying off, Anybody else have a receiver die with similar symptoms? It won't display anything at all on the tv.

 

[FTABman0]

turbo, open it up and look for caps that are raised up in the center on the power supply side and through the box, could be the famous bad cap problem like the CoolSat boxes!

Replace any that are popped up and see what that does for ya! If not, parts STB unless you put money into it to get it serviced!

Capacitors are cheep and you are not out hardly nothing, but worth a try!

I would open it up to see if it is some caps first before replacing the box.

You could have had a power surge during that storm!

For any one else reading this, no electronic knowledge required for replacing them is needed, they have a negative mark on them so put them back in like the old one came out, a Phillips screwdriver and a soldering gun and some solder is all that is all you need. :up

Keep us posted turbo on if you get it going again!

K E V I N

 

[Lak7]

Insert disclaimer about unplugging the unit before attempting to work on it.

 

[willie8605]

If you have never soldered before I wouldn't just try it out for the first time on your receiver. Buy some blank pcb and cheap resistors to practice on. You will need to first take off the old part and then put the new one on. I would recommend getting some flux and wick as well. The wick can be used to extract solder from the pcb so you don't have too much on there and the flux will help the solder attach to the part and pads so you don't get a cold solder joint or have any air pockets in it or anything like that. And if you squirt some flux on the wick, it will pull the solder off the board a lot easier once you heat it with your soldering iron. A q-tip and rubbing alcohol work well for cleaning the flux off the board.

Trained and certified in J-STD-001

 

[sergei]

First thing to do is remove all the cables that are attached and see if the unit will power up correctly., you may have something shorted and loading it down.

Now if your going to try and repair the unit make sure you have the correct tools to do the job. Make sure you have a temperature controlled soldering iron with a 55 watt tip. Other wise you might lift the pads or traces right off the board with too hot an iron.. Use either a solder sucker or the wick type to remove the solder from the board. Another way to remove cap's without damaging the board is to cut the cap leads and then heat and pull the remains out the bottom.

 

[turbosat]

Thanks for the tips guys, I have soldered before and got the wick and all that stuff but I don't know if I'll light into that or not, lol. I mean, it was my main blind-scan box for over 2yrs so I got plenty of use out of it. Until I found something better. (and it'd still be a viewsat if I fixed it , haha). I'll let you know what it looks like inside there, it might be dust-ified. I put another box on that dish today and the dish/lnb and switch seems to be working perfectly so I'm sure that ol VS was the problem.

edit: Ok, popped off the cover and looked with my magnifying glass, I can't see any bulging caps, leaking caps, anything that looks wet, stained, leaking, burned/scorched, or otherwise out of the ordinary. It has a little glass fuse on the power board but it looks fine. I did not try taking it out because I have none of them anyway. Box won't light up an led anywhere now, lol , dead as a hammer.

 

[sergei]

Have you tried measuring the voltages coming out of the power supply to see if there are any voltages present.

 

[turbosat]

Not yet sergei, I'll prob try that next. I have another deal to do first tomorrow--removing another 10' bud from a co-worker's house, at least go look at it and see if its worth the work.
Thks!