All,
As some know we had a somewhat major repeater failure this week. Our backup repeater served its purpose for sure. The repeater in the last couple weeks has intermittently failed without us being able to pinpoint the issue until yesterday 4-24. I made an unprepared trip up Wednesday and found that I was able to key the repeater and hear it but nobody could. So being I wasn’t really prepared to be doing any technical test I put the backup repeater back in service and planned to comeback the next day better prepared. I was accompanied by Alex KD6VPH and we tested the output power of the repeater and found it was basically nonexistent. This pointed us in the direction that the exciter was working but not the PA final amplifier. After a little research this is about the only failure in the Kenwood TKR-750 repeaters. When we opened it up we found that one of the PA final transistors connections had heated up and desoldered itself (see picture). We will try and clean and resolder it and test it for proper operation and go from there.
