Tecsun S-8800

[GB46]

I wonder if the Source still sells that cleaner? I need some.

I bought the last can they had in stock here, but maybe they have a larger store in your area with more stock. Ours is squeezed in between two other stores in a local shopping centre, which in itself is pretty small. Quite a few of the stores in the mall have closed permanently due to the pandemic, so I wonder how long The Source will hold out. Of course, you can order from them online, but that takes a long time.

The little straw that came with the spray can went missing and I have nothing else that fits, so I have to aim the nozzle carefully to avoid overspray.

 

[Boombox]

My Realistic DX394 only tuned in one direction, no matter which direction you turned the tuning knob (this was after it had been unused for several years).

I tried taking it apart to attempt to fix it -- no dice, you need to custom grind a socket to extract the tuning mechanism). Finally, I decided to try to shoot tuner cleaner down the side of the shaft, after noticing that there was a little bit of play in the shaft, and figuring that there was enough room for cleaner to get into the mechanism. This was after I had verified that the tuner encoder (tuning knob mechanism) was a mechanical one and not optical.

It tuner cleaner trick worked. So with some radios this can be a fix. The thinking (at least my own thinking on this) is that if one of the tines inside the mechanism gets oxidized, the CPU thinks the tuner is only moving in one direction. The cleaner removes the oxidation (along with exercising it to get the cleaner on the surfaces of the interior tines), and the CPU now 'sees' the tuner encoder moving in both directions.

If your radio has an optical encoder, of course, you don't want to use tuner cleaner. But all my radios with rotary encoders (DX394, DX398, DX390, etc.) have mechanical ones, either the ones with the little contacts or a potentiometer (DX390).

 

[GB46]

My Realistic DX394 only tuned in one direction, no matter which direction you turned the tuning knob (this was after it had been unused for several years).

I tried taking it apart to attempt to fix it -- no dice, you need to custom grind a socket to extract the tuning mechanism). Finally, I decided to try to shoot tuner cleaner down the side of the shaft, after noticing that there was a little bit of play in the shaft, and figuring that there was enough room for cleaner to get into the mechanism. This was after I had verified that the tuner encoder (tuning knob mechanism) was a mechanical one and not optical.

It tuner cleaner trick worked. So with some radios this can be a fix. The thinking (at least my own thinking on this) is that if one of the tines inside the mechanism gets oxidized, the CPU thinks the tuner is only moving in one direction. The cleaner removes the oxidation (along with exercising it to get the cleaner on the surfaces of the interior tines), and the CPU now 'sees' the tuner encoder moving in both directions.

If your radio has an optical encoder, of course, you don't want to use tuner cleaner. But all my radios with rotary encoders (DX394, DX398, DX390, etc.) have mechanical ones, either the ones with the little contacts or a potentiometer (DX390).

One effect that the spray had on my ATS-909X was that the tuner felt a bit tighter after the treatment. Before that it seemed to have too much play, which had me worried. I've had to repeat the treatment a couple of times since I first got the radio three years ago, but it has always helped. I've been using it a lot lately, so there probably won't be much more oxidization taking place.

The 909X, at least the one I have, has one idiosyncrasy: It behaves like my laptop, in that every couple of months it will suddenly reboot itself during extensive use. The LCD goes blank and the radio shuts off. When I turn it back on everything is fine, except that it starts out with the FM band, like it did when brand new, instead of SW, where I had it before it shut off, and the clock needs to be reset. The memories are still intact, however, and everything else is back to normal. In the case of the laptop, of course, I get the well-known blue screen of death before it reboots a few seconds later.