Artemis Mog 🌸 @[email protected]

And then I'll need to figure out an antenna situation to see if the contact cleaning actually fixed my transmit issue, but that will probably be a project for another weekend. I have an idea, but I'll need to coordinate with the neighbours and get my paws on a slingshot or potato gun.

While I have the radio open, I also want to try a mod that's supposed to add an extra digit to the frequency display precision, which I'll very much appreciate, but I'm referencing the instructions with the service manual and am confused as ever. I'll figure it out though :P

For context, I did previously have the random receive sensitivity cut-outs too. My friend and I thought it was potentially an ALC issue, but then it randomly started working again and we stopped worrying about it. But I think that having happened gives even more credence to this being the most likely cause, which is very encouraging.

Good news! I might not have to tear out the whole board after all! I found this in one of the repair/modification guides for this radio that are floating around the Internet (thank goodness the radio was so popular):

But that board on the bottom is the signal board, where all of the audio processing circuitry lives, and my problem is extremely weak transmit audio in the voice modes. So if the problem isn't there, I don't know where else it could be.

This is the radio, by the way: the Kenwood TS-930S, an HF transceiver from the '80s, shown here upside-down with its covers removed. I _really_ hope I don't have to remove that PCB—there are so many connectors and wires…

And I'm a data hoarder, so these are all probably gonna live on my computer forevermore now :P

Working on repairing a radio of mine, and I can't believe I didn't know about Datasheets360 before now. I thought it was just another one of those sketchy datasheet sites, but it claims to be run by the IEEE and had data for all the 30-year-old discontinued parts I was looking for. I was impressed! Using that for older parts from now on is gonna be way easier than navigating all the questionable Google results

I'd love to see a lawyer's take on this, though, because I haven't seen anyone discuss this anywhere

IANAL, so take all this with a hefty helping of salt:

I'm not totally sure, but I think that might be the first place in state law where sex and gender are recognized as separate. I believe it was likely done with the best of intentions, and it's good to see our lawmakers …admit that they're different. But they haven't updated the rest of the O.C.G.A. to reflect this, and I'm afraid that the dichotomy this creates could be problematic

So this is interesting…The GA legislature finally passed a hate crimes bill a few days ago, and it specifically calls out both sex and gender as motivating factors that someone can be charged under that law for. Now I'm trying to figure out if that's good or bad

There's some corrosion from the leaked electrolyte, but it doesn't look too bad—I should be able to get it cleaned up. The real hard part will be getting the board out of there to replace the cap. I also have a radio that I need to repair, so I'll probably crack it open first to see what it needs, and then order parts for both repairs together. That will likely be at least a few weeks out though; this next week is gonna be pretty busy for me

After struggling with all that for a good while, I finally got the floppy drive free, tested the voltages, got the replacement plugged in. I got everything loosely assembled enough to do a test power-on…only for the laptop to not POST. I think I found the issue though: looks like a kersploded capacitor =/

There's a weird partial-shield? thing that goes up against the floppy drive, and it took me a while to remove it. Eventually I figured out that it's held on by these two metal clips on one end. Didn't get a photo of that unfortunately.

After removing that I was able to access the screws holding the drive in on that side, and then I had to partially remove the whole motherboard from the plastic case a bit to get to the screws on the other side. The case has this bar that perfectly blocks them =/

From here my plan is to replace the floppy drive with another one, button it back up, and see if it'll then boot. It's possible that both the hard drive and floppy drive failed before the computer got to me. If that's the case, I'll attempt to repair the floppy drive; I bet it just needs a bit of cleaning.

I may have solved the display mystery though; the LCD screen plugs into the motherboard with this cable that you have to be careful to unplug when taking the case off. The connector isn't keyed, so I may have just plugged it in backwards last time heh

I opened it up first thing because I wanted to check the floppy drive model to make sure it wasn't a 720k drive or something. It isn't though; the Teac FD-235HF is a pretty ubiquitous 1.44 MB drive

Huh, apparently I took the hard drive out and left it last time I had this opened up. No idea where it could be now. It just kinda floated over the motherboard there, screwed into the sides of the enclosure. Standard IDE connection but a weird miniature power connector