Lightning and scorch marks and soot.
Oh my!
Welcome to the world of Ebay Browning radios. In all fairness, the transmitter in the first pics was not purchased alongside the receiver below it here. Two different base stations, but one clear trend.
Down hill.
I'll guess that the pictures showing this Mark 3 transmitter did not include a shot of the rear panel. If it had, the prospective buyer might have spotted this:
Turns out it's not the only scorch mark in this transmitter.
This customer wisely decided not to pump the money needed for this repair into a radio this sad.
Here's a flavor of sabotage I can't remember seeing before. Someone has chosen about three dozen random resistors to "upgrade" with new parts rated for 1 percent tolerance. But this strategy demands one major detail. You need to interpret the color code correctly.
Hint: The new resistors all have blue body color. The original ones were brown.
The confusion arises because there is no silver (10%) or gold (5%) tolerance band at one end of the resistor. The color for the numeral one is brown. So, the color band indicating tolerance is brown.
The bands that indicate resistance value are bunched closer together at the opposite end from the brown tolerance band. A resistor with a value that begins with "1", like a 10k part has a brown band at each end.
What adds confusion to this is the additional digit band. That's the mantissa for you math egghead types. You can describe the steps between standard values with only two digits for 5 and 10 percent parts. But the standard steps of resistance value are closer together for 1 percent parts. This means you need three digits to indicate that part of the resistor's value. And a fourth band for the exponent, er 'how many zeros'.
This seems to have caused some error in this radio. Some of the new parts are the correct resistance value.
Some.
In this pic, a closer view shows one resistor that's bigger than the others. It's a 1-Watt part, with a blue, gray black and another brown band. That's six, eight, zero and one more zero. 6800 ohms or 6.8k. This is in fact the correct value for this part in this circuit. The half-Watt part just to the right of the quartz crystal has yellow, violet, black and red. This translates the 47k. Again, the right part. But a handful of other resistors not as easy to photograph clearly are totally bogus and crippled this receiver.
This is not a new trend, buying a Browning base radio and finding that it was either driven over a cliff, sabotaged with a poor repair attempt, or sometimes both.
Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chance.
73
Oh my!
Welcome to the world of Ebay Browning radios. In all fairness, the transmitter in the first pics was not purchased alongside the receiver below it here. Two different base stations, but one clear trend.
Down hill.
I'll guess that the pictures showing this Mark 3 transmitter did not include a shot of the rear panel. If it had, the prospective buyer might have spotted this:
Turns out it's not the only scorch mark in this transmitter.
This customer wisely decided not to pump the money needed for this repair into a radio this sad.
Here's a flavor of sabotage I can't remember seeing before. Someone has chosen about three dozen random resistors to "upgrade" with new parts rated for 1 percent tolerance. But this strategy demands one major detail. You need to interpret the color code correctly.
Hint: The new resistors all have blue body color. The original ones were brown.
The confusion arises because there is no silver (10%) or gold (5%) tolerance band at one end of the resistor. The color for the numeral one is brown. So, the color band indicating tolerance is brown.
The bands that indicate resistance value are bunched closer together at the opposite end from the brown tolerance band. A resistor with a value that begins with "1", like a 10k part has a brown band at each end.
What adds confusion to this is the additional digit band. That's the mantissa for you math egghead types. You can describe the steps between standard values with only two digits for 5 and 10 percent parts. But the standard steps of resistance value are closer together for 1 percent parts. This means you need three digits to indicate that part of the resistor's value. And a fourth band for the exponent, er 'how many zeros'.
This seems to have caused some error in this radio. Some of the new parts are the correct resistance value.
Some.
In this pic, a closer view shows one resistor that's bigger than the others. It's a 1-Watt part, with a blue, gray black and another brown band. That's six, eight, zero and one more zero. 6800 ohms or 6.8k. This is in fact the correct value for this part in this circuit. The half-Watt part just to the right of the quartz crystal has yellow, violet, black and red. This translates the 47k. Again, the right part. But a handful of other resistors not as easy to photograph clearly are totally bogus and crippled this receiver.
This is not a new trend, buying a Browning base radio and finding that it was either driven over a cliff, sabotaged with a poor repair attempt, or sometimes both.
Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chance.
73
