Ahhh memories! One slow summer I spent a few weeks bringing 4 (four) dead AilTech 360 back to factory specs... They all suffered from cold soldering joints (and a few bad transisitors). Both the 180MHz and the 1,8GHz units
We later upgraded to Comstron FS2000-2 which suffered from the very same problem with bad soldering joints. I was keeping those alive with the aid of a rubber hammer, but later reverted to resolder all the filter tabs within the units. Met the designer of both the 360 and the Comstron, Robert Papaiek, and he was a bit offended when I complained about the poor "design". It was all due to production was the answer :) Never-the-less our PTS seems to work ok, but needs some TLC with the coarse tuning pots after 5-10 years... One of our PTS-1000 had a very odd problem which was traced to a faulty molded screened inductor from Coilcraft. Had a nice discussion with the QC guys at Coilcraft and Michael Lohrer at PTS, and we all decided this was a "one off" :) Analogue Direct Synthesis is the way to go if you want fast switching into microwaves. You can get infinite resolution by just adding another decade module, and they are all the same... The draw-back is you need plenty of filters and proper sheilding to get specral purity. There should be plenty of reading on the web /Lasse _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
