AOR 8200 malfunction

[tygrys]

My dear radio has decided to act in a most unbecoming way, rendering it useless. It powers up, beeps, and the display lights up but the text on the screen is very faint and it refuses to scan. It appears I can change modes somewhat but cannot get any response from any channels. It worked fine until it spent a winter in my garage in a box and when turned on in the spring behaved this way. Can anyone offer a starting point for troubleshooting or better yet a decent source for a service manual, or even better still someon willing to take a crack at its repair? Many thanks in advance!

 

[Fast1eddie]

Hopefully you did not store it with the batteries inside. Start with your power supply-is it regulated??? Good DC connection-any leakage or gunk in the battery compartment?? It will eventually form a ground to the inside board contacts. There is a soft reset, sometimes this works. Do this: While pushing down on the clear key, turn on the radio and release after the opening message and a frequency is displayed in 2VFO.

Mine was acting screwy so I sent it in to AOR USA (Torrence Ca) for repair. Just got it back last Friday and it performs nice. I highly recommend them, they perform excellent work.

 

[tygrys]

Thanks for the reply Ed. Well there are a couple of more parts to this now. Firstly yes the batteries did once leak in it but I thought I cleaned it pretty well. . I have used batteries on occasion but they don't work reliably either. The creeping crud concept will be explored for sure
Secondly the power supply has worked flawlessly for many years but was bought here in the states because alas the radio did not come with one new... which leads me to the last point- I bought the radio from Javiation in the UK so AOR USA probably won't want to service it.
I am able to get the display on but the text is barely legible, no matter how I try to change the contrast. Note that the buttons do allow me to make changes. Whenever I try to scan it gives me a PLL error message. I have tried multiple times to soft reset to no avail. I have tried to set the power save functions and all the other workarounds for misbehaviour that I found in the manual and online. No luck. Once in a while it allows me to pick up a random station but not one of the NFM stations I usually want to monitor. Rarely I can get noise by turning the squelch down but not predictably. I get no sound when I push the monitor button. Are we getting closer?