[On The Bench] is a new category for diagnosis and repair of radios, test equipment and other electronics as I come across them. I am focusing on education in this series, learning how to diagnose, confirm and repair faults.


---


I had a neighbour that had a problem with their portable radio cassette deck unit and I asked if I could help repair it for them. The symptoms were that the radio could play on AC power but would not work on batteries. The customer replaced the batteries but it still would not work.


I thought this would be an interesting repair to video and, along the way, show some diagnosis techniques especially around the initial investigation and determining an initial probable cause. Once a probable cause theory is determined then the radio is opened to confirm root cause.


The radio ended up "fixing itself" even before I started but I continued with the repair in order to make sure that any intermittent problem was resolved.


On a different subject, the Bass Monoblock amp is on hold for a bit due to other work priorities. I have schematics, board layout and even have boards made and stuffed and are back so there is a lot to video and catch up on. Hopefully within a week or two I should be able to get another video out in the series, likely looking at the frond end (schematics, prototype testing, board layout, board testing) and then do the same thing for the phase inverter prototype.