18-07-2016, 05:51 PM
Recently I was contacted by Darryl (the guy in the US who makes and sells Auroras) to help sort out a problem with an Aurora SCRF that had been sold in the UK. I'm always happy to do this, however old the unit. Don't usually make a charge but often request a donation to the Vintage Wireless Museum.
After an exchange of emails with the owner it arrived. No fault found. The owner was pretty much non technical and had bought a restored late 1950s set. Said set had developed a fault. I suppose I should have asked the right questions before asking him to send it to me. He would have saved almost £15 in Special Delivery postage.
Since he only had one set he had nothing to crosscheck the Aurora but I'll say it again out loud:
Auroras are very reliable. Old TVs are not.
About 700 Aurora SCRF have been sold, there have been perhaps a handful of failures. The ones I can remember:
Somebody managed to get rather too much DC on the video input and blew a couple of resistors. I worked out what must have happened and the owner then fessed up to what he'd been doing. Readily repaired and hardly a reliability problem. That merited a decent Museum donation.
A whisker of copper inside the RF output connector that gave intermittent output. Truly horrible duff component problem.
Soldering problem on the main Xilinx chip. One pin was making intermittent contact. Was fine until it reached the customer
Decoder chip failed. I still have that one which was replaced FOC by Darryl. I managed to butcher the PCB while removing the old chip. May be able to fix it one day to get a spare Aurora.
The power plug that made bad contact due to using a 2.5mm centre pin plug with the Aurora's 2.1mm socket. I won't name names, but the owner of that one really should have worked it out
After an exchange of emails with the owner it arrived. No fault found. The owner was pretty much non technical and had bought a restored late 1950s set. Said set had developed a fault. I suppose I should have asked the right questions before asking him to send it to me. He would have saved almost £15 in Special Delivery postage.
Since he only had one set he had nothing to crosscheck the Aurora but I'll say it again out loud:
Auroras are very reliable. Old TVs are not.
About 700 Aurora SCRF have been sold, there have been perhaps a handful of failures. The ones I can remember:
Somebody managed to get rather too much DC on the video input and blew a couple of resistors. I worked out what must have happened and the owner then fessed up to what he'd been doing. Readily repaired and hardly a reliability problem. That merited a decent Museum donation.
A whisker of copper inside the RF output connector that gave intermittent output. Truly horrible duff component problem.
Soldering problem on the main Xilinx chip. One pin was making intermittent contact. Was fine until it reached the customer
Decoder chip failed. I still have that one which was replaced FOC by Darryl. I managed to butcher the PCB while removing the old chip. May be able to fix it one day to get a spare Aurora.
The power plug that made bad contact due to using a 2.5mm centre pin plug with the Aurora's 2.1mm socket. I won't name names, but the owner of that one really should have worked it out
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
