In the past I have written about screw-ups I had made that proved that I am actually a mere mortal human being rather than the all-knowing scanner god most people think of me as. These included using a BC125AT thinking it was a BCD325HP to talk someone thru an issue, mislabeling a programming cable and wondering why it didn’t work and programming the wrong frequency in a scanner making for some really odd listening. Pretty coomon misteaks that anyone could make but I had always thought myself to be above such petty errors like that.
Some mistakes however are somewhat more destructive as we will see in today’s edition of Scanner Tales. I previously wrote about the life and sudden death of my very first scanner at Scanner Tales: The life and death of my Regency TMR-8H or the time I destroyed my perfectly good 2004 to figure out the diode matrix. There were others…
What is that blue smoke coming from, again and again?
Many of us at one time or another have let the magic blue smoke out of a radio. Some of us have done it on multiple radios. It takes real skill to do it on the same radio, not once, not twice but three times.
For a while the group of friends I hung out with in high school were into CB radios. It was the 70’s so everyone had one. The Cobra 19 was the most common but the radio you really wanted then was the Cobra 29. This one had all the bells and whistles, more knobs and switches and just looked so damn cool. Of course, none of us really knew what half these controls did, but it looked impressive and was a badge of honor if you had one in your car. It was even better with an Astatic Power Mic!
There was a story running around then that by removing a couple components one could increase the power output. I don’t remember what they were, but it seemed to work. I first did this on my buddy Dan’s radio to see if it worked. I just bought my own 29 and wasn’t willing to risk it until I saw that it actually did work. After the success of Dan’s radio surgery, I did the same to mine. I have no idea what happened but when I plugged it in to the power lead it did not power up but after a minute or so we started to smell then see the smoke emitting from the back of the radio.
That turned out to be something in the power circuitry, I assume we dropped a solder ball or wire remnant that shorted something out. A little blast from an air compressor (no canned air back then) and all was well with the world again aside from a little smoke stain inside the cover of the radio. No one would see that anyway.
The next instance was after attempting another mod suggested by a guy who knew someone who worked in a CB shop. He said to move this wire from here to there to increase the power level. Well, I moved said wire from here to there, reassembled the radio and turned it on. It seemed to work just fine, for a while. A week or two later and more magic smoke appeared. My soldering skills had not improved, and a cold solder joint caused the relocated wire to relocate again on its own and caused some sort of short. This was more damaging than the first debacle and required a repair from a more seasoned idiot.
The next and final nail in the coffin of my prized Cobra 29 was a power lead mishap. Somehow, I connected the power lead with reverse polarity. I don’t recall if I wired it wrong, forced the plug in the back of the radio backwards or what but after I started the car, I didn’t notice that the radio didn’t turn on and a few blocks down the road the car filled up with acrid smelling smoke. I pulled over, shut off the car and pulled the radio out. The power lead was melted, and the case was hot to the touch. When I opened the case there was all kinds of smoke damage and the guy at the CB shop said to trash it.
I miss my BC950XLT:
I had a BC760XLT and loved it. I read that the BC950XLT was the same radio but with a different color front (grey vs. black) and sold exclusively by Scanner World. The car I had at the time had a grey interior, and the 950 would fit aesthetically better in it. I ordered one and it worked great, just like my 760.
One of the magazines or books of the day had a description of the cellular mod for this radio so I figured I would try it. I did my 760 first and it worked well. While the 760 didn’t have the 30 KHz. spacing like the RS scanners did the signals were wide enough that it didn’t matter.
I was happy with that, so I recovered my 950 from the car and did the modification to it as well. That did not turn out to be as successful. I don’t have a clue what happened but when I clipped the lead of the IC and shorted it to the neighboring lead I must have fried the CPU of the radio. The radio would turn on and the back light would come on but there was no display nor sound. I brought the scanner to a repair center locally and they said it would require a new CPU, which meant a new main board and it would be cheaper to buy a new radio, so I did. By then the 950 was no longer available so I ended up with another 760 instead. It worked just as well but just did not really match the car it was installed in.
How to turn a perfectly good Icom into a parts source.
In prior stories I have mentioned my ownership of a few different R7000’s as well as one or two of them being owned by me more than once, having traded for my old radio from the friend whom I had traded it to. One of these R7000’s ended up becoming a parts source the second time I owned it. The R7000 was well known as pretty easy to repair and modify, with tons of interior room, several internal and external add-ons like the Remote Control module, voice announcements and even a TV tuner. I had all these add-ons, but not on the same radio at the same time. The RC unit was on my R71A, the voice board was on one of my R7000’s and the TV tuner on the other. I decided to make one of my R7000’s s total prima donna and have all the boards installed. As I disassembled all three radios to scavenge the boards from two and add them to the third I decided that it was a great time to replace the power supply capacitors in the two R7000’s. The first one went just fine, new caps went in and the add-on boards worked great.
The second R7000 however did not fare so well. I suspect that I put in one of the big capacitors backwards or perhaps made some bad solder joints. Bad soldering jobs seemed to be a recurring theme with me at the time I guess. Regardless of the actual fault the result was a fried radio. There was a copious amount of smoke and by the time I figured out that it was from the left R7000 it was too late. Not only was the DC-DC converter toast but the capacitor must have exploded inside the radio, spewing some sort of gunk all over the rest of the nearby boards. Once circuit board was burnt thru. The R7000 ran on 12VDC, and the AC power supply would convert line current to 12VDC. If you ran the radio directly on 12VDC you would connect it to the DC power cable and remove a jumper plug to disconnect the AC supply. I don’t know how but I suspect that the radio may have been modified prior to my owning of it as there was some differences in the appearance of the DC section on this radio from my other R7000 so it might not have been totally my fault.
After this disaster I sent the damaged R7000 to EEB in Virginia for repair. They called me and said the repairs would be something like $400 or so. At the time used R7000’s were going for $500 or so, probably about $1500 in today’s dollars. I declined the repair and paid the $20 to have the radio sent back to me. I kept it around for a few years and scavenged it for parts. The first was the glass cover on the display, it went to the R71A after that one was cracked. The display itself went to a friends R7000 and the case halves replaced the ones on my R7000, which were pretty well scratched up from being used mobile (a story for another time!) Eventually I sold the carcass at a hamfest for $100 to a guy who said he had a couple dozen Icom’s and he probably combined it with a few other beater radios to Frankenstein a working radio.
Why they invented fuses:
During a period of time in my old house I gave up the spare bedroom to my stepson when he moved back to Illinois. He was saving up to buy a house so we offered to help and put him up for a couple years. That meant my office was gone but I was OK with that. I had stepped back a little from radio stuff for a but due to a promotion at work which came with more time there and less for playing with radios. The wife and I sold out desktop computers and bought laptops and I put a bunch of my radios into storage. I kept a few out however and set up a single rack stack with an Astron power supply to power them. The power supply was way overkill for a couple GM300’s, 3 scanners and a Kenwood dual bander but it was what I had.
I wired it all up but always thought I was missing something; I couldn’t remember what. I powered it up and it all worked just fine, for a couple weeks at least. I came home from work one day and while fixing dinner (OK, while answering the door for the pizza guy…) I thought the pizza seemed to smell weird. The pizza guy asked if there was anything burning, and I realized it wasn’t the pizza that smelled bad.
I started to investigate and tracked it down to my bedroom where the radio cabinet was. I could see a small wisp of smoke emanating from the lower section of the cabinet. I pulled the power plug from the wall and opened the cabinet door. One of the power leads apparently got caught in the cabinet door and frayed, leading to a short circuit. It was then that I realized what I had forgotten a few weeks prior; fuses. I had wired all the radios to the studs on the back of the Astron and forgotten to protect them with fuses. Well, the dual bander had an inline fuses, as did the Motorolas, but not the scanners.
I don’t know how long that short had been there, but the wire was well and thoroughly melted, that then started to melt the wire leading to another scanner, which in turn shorted, starting it to also melt. Thankfully it was discovered before it burnt the house down or worse yet destroyed my prized pair of BC780XLT’s.
Since then, I have been fastidious about fusing my power leads. I carefully cipher out the power requirements and install the appropriately sized fuse. Since I have switched over to PowerPoles I use fused PowerPole devices from Powerwerx, West Mountain, MFJ or others with a master fuse and individual fuses for the outputs.
Attic Adventures:
In my old house, like my current one, I had antennas in the attic on account of living in an HOA. They actually worked pretty well, the house was on the highest spot in the neighborhood and the attic was large enough to move around and hold a bunch of antennas.
I did however miss a joist and put my foot thru the ceiling of the hallway once. Thankfully the wife was out of town for a couple days and didn’t notice the slightly different shade of ceiling white. My buddy next door was a painter and pretty good with drywall and got it patched up and painted that same afternoon.
Here in my current house I have learned that it is easier to sit down than it is to stand up in a cramped area. As I age my knees and legs aren’t what they used to be. I was installing an antenna in one of the far corners of the attic and the only way to get to that side was to lie down on a joist and roll under an air duct, then move my legs to the next joist. A gymnast I am not. An overweight senior citizen with bad knees and a big belly I am. The first time I tried this I got myself stuck under the air duct as my knees and legs weren’t strong enough to lift myself due to a cramp that developed at just the wrong time.
As I contemplated my poor life choices, especially the one where I left my cell phone in the office I tried to figure out how I was going to get myself out of the predicament. I couldn’t call for help since my wife is deaf and wouldn’t hear me. That makes it great for a radio guy as I don’t have to worry about her complaining about the noise, but can cause issues when I need help. The house and attic was too large and distant from the neighbors so they wouldn’t hear me yelling. It was springtime in Arizona, which means it was only about 100 degrees outside, roughly twice that in the attic. I figured I would have about a half hour at best before I either melted or died of heat stroke.
I finally had an idea. I had the Belden 9913 coax I was going to use for the antenna I was installing within reach. I could use that to pull me up to free myself from the stuckness I was suffering from. I unwound enough to make a small ball that I was able to toss (after several attempts) over a nearby support joist. I then pulled myself up with the wire enough to allow me to swing my legs over to the next ceiling joist and rolled over to kneel on that joist. I ended up with a face full of insulation and sore knees for a few days, but I was able to extricate myself from the attic. The coax was destroyed as it was pretty well stretched out, but I can live with that.
I have since learned how to get in and out of that section of the attic. First off, I only do so in December or January. Second, I found an easier way to roll under the duct. Third, I placed a couple 2x12 planks to help support my body as I roll.
There are many other stories that prove the level of my idiocy that don’t involve radio directly, like the time I sawed off the handle of my wheel cart I was using to hold the plywood I was cutting with my power saw. I am still alive somehow and my wife hasn’t divorced or killed me (yet) so I must be doing something right.
Some mistakes however are somewhat more destructive as we will see in today’s edition of Scanner Tales. I previously wrote about the life and sudden death of my very first scanner at Scanner Tales: The life and death of my Regency TMR-8H or the time I destroyed my perfectly good 2004 to figure out the diode matrix. There were others…
What is that blue smoke coming from, again and again?
Many of us at one time or another have let the magic blue smoke out of a radio. Some of us have done it on multiple radios. It takes real skill to do it on the same radio, not once, not twice but three times.
For a while the group of friends I hung out with in high school were into CB radios. It was the 70’s so everyone had one. The Cobra 19 was the most common but the radio you really wanted then was the Cobra 29. This one had all the bells and whistles, more knobs and switches and just looked so damn cool. Of course, none of us really knew what half these controls did, but it looked impressive and was a badge of honor if you had one in your car. It was even better with an Astatic Power Mic!
There was a story running around then that by removing a couple components one could increase the power output. I don’t remember what they were, but it seemed to work. I first did this on my buddy Dan’s radio to see if it worked. I just bought my own 29 and wasn’t willing to risk it until I saw that it actually did work. After the success of Dan’s radio surgery, I did the same to mine. I have no idea what happened but when I plugged it in to the power lead it did not power up but after a minute or so we started to smell then see the smoke emitting from the back of the radio.
That turned out to be something in the power circuitry, I assume we dropped a solder ball or wire remnant that shorted something out. A little blast from an air compressor (no canned air back then) and all was well with the world again aside from a little smoke stain inside the cover of the radio. No one would see that anyway.
The next instance was after attempting another mod suggested by a guy who knew someone who worked in a CB shop. He said to move this wire from here to there to increase the power level. Well, I moved said wire from here to there, reassembled the radio and turned it on. It seemed to work just fine, for a while. A week or two later and more magic smoke appeared. My soldering skills had not improved, and a cold solder joint caused the relocated wire to relocate again on its own and caused some sort of short. This was more damaging than the first debacle and required a repair from a more seasoned idiot.
The next and final nail in the coffin of my prized Cobra 29 was a power lead mishap. Somehow, I connected the power lead with reverse polarity. I don’t recall if I wired it wrong, forced the plug in the back of the radio backwards or what but after I started the car, I didn’t notice that the radio didn’t turn on and a few blocks down the road the car filled up with acrid smelling smoke. I pulled over, shut off the car and pulled the radio out. The power lead was melted, and the case was hot to the touch. When I opened the case there was all kinds of smoke damage and the guy at the CB shop said to trash it.
I miss my BC950XLT:
I had a BC760XLT and loved it. I read that the BC950XLT was the same radio but with a different color front (grey vs. black) and sold exclusively by Scanner World. The car I had at the time had a grey interior, and the 950 would fit aesthetically better in it. I ordered one and it worked great, just like my 760.
One of the magazines or books of the day had a description of the cellular mod for this radio so I figured I would try it. I did my 760 first and it worked well. While the 760 didn’t have the 30 KHz. spacing like the RS scanners did the signals were wide enough that it didn’t matter.
I was happy with that, so I recovered my 950 from the car and did the modification to it as well. That did not turn out to be as successful. I don’t have a clue what happened but when I clipped the lead of the IC and shorted it to the neighboring lead I must have fried the CPU of the radio. The radio would turn on and the back light would come on but there was no display nor sound. I brought the scanner to a repair center locally and they said it would require a new CPU, which meant a new main board and it would be cheaper to buy a new radio, so I did. By then the 950 was no longer available so I ended up with another 760 instead. It worked just as well but just did not really match the car it was installed in.
How to turn a perfectly good Icom into a parts source.
In prior stories I have mentioned my ownership of a few different R7000’s as well as one or two of them being owned by me more than once, having traded for my old radio from the friend whom I had traded it to. One of these R7000’s ended up becoming a parts source the second time I owned it. The R7000 was well known as pretty easy to repair and modify, with tons of interior room, several internal and external add-ons like the Remote Control module, voice announcements and even a TV tuner. I had all these add-ons, but not on the same radio at the same time. The RC unit was on my R71A, the voice board was on one of my R7000’s and the TV tuner on the other. I decided to make one of my R7000’s s total prima donna and have all the boards installed. As I disassembled all three radios to scavenge the boards from two and add them to the third I decided that it was a great time to replace the power supply capacitors in the two R7000’s. The first one went just fine, new caps went in and the add-on boards worked great.
The second R7000 however did not fare so well. I suspect that I put in one of the big capacitors backwards or perhaps made some bad solder joints. Bad soldering jobs seemed to be a recurring theme with me at the time I guess. Regardless of the actual fault the result was a fried radio. There was a copious amount of smoke and by the time I figured out that it was from the left R7000 it was too late. Not only was the DC-DC converter toast but the capacitor must have exploded inside the radio, spewing some sort of gunk all over the rest of the nearby boards. Once circuit board was burnt thru. The R7000 ran on 12VDC, and the AC power supply would convert line current to 12VDC. If you ran the radio directly on 12VDC you would connect it to the DC power cable and remove a jumper plug to disconnect the AC supply. I don’t know how but I suspect that the radio may have been modified prior to my owning of it as there was some differences in the appearance of the DC section on this radio from my other R7000 so it might not have been totally my fault.
After this disaster I sent the damaged R7000 to EEB in Virginia for repair. They called me and said the repairs would be something like $400 or so. At the time used R7000’s were going for $500 or so, probably about $1500 in today’s dollars. I declined the repair and paid the $20 to have the radio sent back to me. I kept it around for a few years and scavenged it for parts. The first was the glass cover on the display, it went to the R71A after that one was cracked. The display itself went to a friends R7000 and the case halves replaced the ones on my R7000, which were pretty well scratched up from being used mobile (a story for another time!) Eventually I sold the carcass at a hamfest for $100 to a guy who said he had a couple dozen Icom’s and he probably combined it with a few other beater radios to Frankenstein a working radio.
Why they invented fuses:
During a period of time in my old house I gave up the spare bedroom to my stepson when he moved back to Illinois. He was saving up to buy a house so we offered to help and put him up for a couple years. That meant my office was gone but I was OK with that. I had stepped back a little from radio stuff for a but due to a promotion at work which came with more time there and less for playing with radios. The wife and I sold out desktop computers and bought laptops and I put a bunch of my radios into storage. I kept a few out however and set up a single rack stack with an Astron power supply to power them. The power supply was way overkill for a couple GM300’s, 3 scanners and a Kenwood dual bander but it was what I had.
I wired it all up but always thought I was missing something; I couldn’t remember what. I powered it up and it all worked just fine, for a couple weeks at least. I came home from work one day and while fixing dinner (OK, while answering the door for the pizza guy…) I thought the pizza seemed to smell weird. The pizza guy asked if there was anything burning, and I realized it wasn’t the pizza that smelled bad.
I started to investigate and tracked it down to my bedroom where the radio cabinet was. I could see a small wisp of smoke emanating from the lower section of the cabinet. I pulled the power plug from the wall and opened the cabinet door. One of the power leads apparently got caught in the cabinet door and frayed, leading to a short circuit. It was then that I realized what I had forgotten a few weeks prior; fuses. I had wired all the radios to the studs on the back of the Astron and forgotten to protect them with fuses. Well, the dual bander had an inline fuses, as did the Motorolas, but not the scanners.
I don’t know how long that short had been there, but the wire was well and thoroughly melted, that then started to melt the wire leading to another scanner, which in turn shorted, starting it to also melt. Thankfully it was discovered before it burnt the house down or worse yet destroyed my prized pair of BC780XLT’s.
Since then, I have been fastidious about fusing my power leads. I carefully cipher out the power requirements and install the appropriately sized fuse. Since I have switched over to PowerPoles I use fused PowerPole devices from Powerwerx, West Mountain, MFJ or others with a master fuse and individual fuses for the outputs.
Attic Adventures:
In my old house, like my current one, I had antennas in the attic on account of living in an HOA. They actually worked pretty well, the house was on the highest spot in the neighborhood and the attic was large enough to move around and hold a bunch of antennas.
I did however miss a joist and put my foot thru the ceiling of the hallway once. Thankfully the wife was out of town for a couple days and didn’t notice the slightly different shade of ceiling white. My buddy next door was a painter and pretty good with drywall and got it patched up and painted that same afternoon.
Here in my current house I have learned that it is easier to sit down than it is to stand up in a cramped area. As I age my knees and legs aren’t what they used to be. I was installing an antenna in one of the far corners of the attic and the only way to get to that side was to lie down on a joist and roll under an air duct, then move my legs to the next joist. A gymnast I am not. An overweight senior citizen with bad knees and a big belly I am. The first time I tried this I got myself stuck under the air duct as my knees and legs weren’t strong enough to lift myself due to a cramp that developed at just the wrong time.
As I contemplated my poor life choices, especially the one where I left my cell phone in the office I tried to figure out how I was going to get myself out of the predicament. I couldn’t call for help since my wife is deaf and wouldn’t hear me. That makes it great for a radio guy as I don’t have to worry about her complaining about the noise, but can cause issues when I need help. The house and attic was too large and distant from the neighbors so they wouldn’t hear me yelling. It was springtime in Arizona, which means it was only about 100 degrees outside, roughly twice that in the attic. I figured I would have about a half hour at best before I either melted or died of heat stroke.
I finally had an idea. I had the Belden 9913 coax I was going to use for the antenna I was installing within reach. I could use that to pull me up to free myself from the stuckness I was suffering from. I unwound enough to make a small ball that I was able to toss (after several attempts) over a nearby support joist. I then pulled myself up with the wire enough to allow me to swing my legs over to the next ceiling joist and rolled over to kneel on that joist. I ended up with a face full of insulation and sore knees for a few days, but I was able to extricate myself from the attic. The coax was destroyed as it was pretty well stretched out, but I can live with that.
I have since learned how to get in and out of that section of the attic. First off, I only do so in December or January. Second, I found an easier way to roll under the duct. Third, I placed a couple 2x12 planks to help support my body as I roll.
There are many other stories that prove the level of my idiocy that don’t involve radio directly, like the time I sawed off the handle of my wheel cart I was using to hold the plywood I was cutting with my power saw. I am still alive somehow and my wife hasn’t divorced or killed me (yet) so I must be doing something right.
