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SERVICEMAN'S LOG
Snoring through the night
Dave Thompson*
Because I supposedly “know everything about electronics”, I am often
called upon to solve all sorts of technical dilemmas. But on this occasion
I thought that someone must have already thought of the solution to
this problem. Evidently, not. So could I come up with an electronic
solution to the age-old problem of snoring and its effects on matrimonial
harmony? You be the judge.
Over the years, my oldest friends
and acquaintances have come to
know me as a fix-it man, someone to
turn to when something breaks down.
However, there was also a time when I
got calls to stand in for musician friends
in their bands, or for assistance changing a head gasket on a friend’s old banger that really should have been driven
to the local scrap yard and left there.
Sometimes I’d get a call to help out
at the local model aircraft derby and
I can still smell the burnt nitromethane and ethanol and hear the scream
of high-performance model plane
engines. These days, people come
to me when their computer doesn’t
work properly or their amplifier stops
amplifying.
And that’s a good thing; pulling allnighters, playing rock and roll and
wearing leather pants are for young
people (unless you’re a member of the
58 Silicon Chip
Rolling Stones) and all that loud music
and those model plane engines contributed greatly to the hearing problems I have today.
Thankfully, I still sometimes get
asked to fix something a bit outside
the square, and the following tale illustrates one such occasion.
A while ago, an old friend I hadn’t
seen for a few years dropped by for
the obligatory bull session. We’d talk
about lost youth and about how it is
wasted on the young and discuss the
meaning of life; the usual stuff.
When it came to how things were
going at home, it turns out that there
were problems and it was all down to
my friend’s snoring. This is a familiar
tale in shared bedrooms everywhere.
As us blokes age, we tend to start snoring. Often, it’s down to weaker throat
muscles and/or weight gain that often
arrives with middle age.
Whatever the cause, snoring doesn’t
bother the snorer; for some odd reason, they don’t hear it and they’ll often swear they aren’t snoring, even
if it sounds like a chainsaw chorus,
leading to spouses sometimes making recordings to prove their case. It
is only when snoring leads to health
issues like sleep apnoea that
it has any impact on the
snorer; by far the most
misery is imposed
upon the person sharing the bedroom!
Surely, my friend
lamented, all this fancy technology and electronics voodoo that I do
would have a solution to
this problem.
He’d searched the inter-
net and asked everyone he knew, including his doctor, about what could
be done. Lose weight, was the medical
advice. Or have surgery. Avoiding dairy
after 6pm was a solution for some.
Pharmacists and health store workers sold him expensive contraptions;
one pulled his tongue out while he
slept, while another is an elastic sling
that wrapped around his head and
held his jaw forward. Others swore
that peg-like devices that closed his
nose off or opened it up were the
answer, but none of these snake oil
products stopped his snoring.
People on internet forums offered
all sorts of traditional suggestions,
such as sewing tennis balls into pockets on the snorer’s pyjamas to prevent
him sleeping on his back, or advised
placing peeled garlic or a raw onion
beside his pillow.
I’m sure all this advice was given
with the best intentions, and no doubt
some of these methods worked for
some snorers, but unfortunately none
of them worked for my friend. Was
there a gadget I could make that could
help, perhaps?
I felt his pain. I’ve been known to
snore the odd night myself (apparently) and could empathise; it is no laughing matter. Some snoring is quite dangerous and could be symptomatic of a
wider problem, which is why a doctor’s opinion should always be sought.
I thought about it a lot over the following days and weeks and came up
with an idea that I thought might work.
I’ve long since discovered that no matter what bright idea I might have, it
will have been thought of before.
The Chinese have a proverb, “Nothing is ever new, only what has been forsiliconchip.com.au
Items Covered This Month
•
•
•
A do-it yourself snoring solution
It’s just not cricket
Sherwood CD player
*Dave Thompson runs PC Anytime
in Christchurch, NZ.
Website: www.pcanytime.co.nz
Email: dave<at>pcanytime.co.nz
gotten.” If someone has thought of it
before, then the internet would know
about it.
My idea was simple enough; make
up a ‘VOX’, a voice-operated switch
that when triggered, would send a
warning signal to a pillow speaker
placed in or under the snorer’s pillow.
This would wake him up (or her; women also snore, though of course they’ll
never admit it), and thus stop the noise.
Over time, the snorer would be
trained to respond to the sound and
stop snoring as soon as he starts.
Although this method obviously
wouldn’t stop a snorer snoring
altogether, theoretically at least if
the device worked as expected, the
impact of the snoring should be
greatly reduced. After searching the
web I found a single oblique reference
to a similar idea but like many historic
forum posts, the attachments referred
to had long-since disappeared.
siliconchip.com.au
I did find a very complicated circuit
diagram of a device similar to what I
was considering, but I could find nothing else about it and decided I’d just
have to build up something myself.
Like all things in hobby electronics, it could be as simple or as complicated as the builder wants to make
it. The premise was simple enough;
there were no end of sound or voiceactivated switch circuits out there, and
even a few kits for sale at the usual
hobby electronics outlets.
These are very reasonably priced
given that buying all the separate
components would likely cost more
than the kit, and with a kit you might
also get a pre-drilled box and screenprinted PCB, two components that
can make a project much more complicated (and costly) if you have to
make them up yourself.
I was sure S ilicon C hip had
produced a VOX in years past and
so the magazine’s website was
my first stop. I found one project
listed; published
way back in March
1994, before I
started buying
the magazine
and while the
article was available from the
Silicon Chip
store, there was
no PCB, I decided to look at other
options.
Most of the circuits on the web used
an electret microphone insert, maybe
a potentiometer, a handful of resistors
and capacitors, an op-amp IC and/or a
couple of transistors and a relay, all of
which I had in my assortment of bits
and pieces.
However, as I wasn’t certain the idea
would even fly and because I didn’t
know whether any of those circuits
on the internet were proven runners
either, I decided to start with a kit; at
least I’d know it worked and with so
many other unknowns in this project,
it would give me a good foundation to
build on for the rest of it.
It didn’t take long to find and assemble the kit and as expected, it worked
perfectly straight out of the box. I made
a few simple mods, adding a potentiometer instead of their method of
trialling various fixed resistors to determine microphone sensitivity and
added a capacitor in order to hold the
relay closed for a few seconds longer
February 2017 59
Serr v ice
Se
ceman’s
man’s Log – continued
than the ‘factory’ setting once noise
triggering ceased.
I then turned my attention to the
annunciator part of the project. My
original idea was to use a simple
oscillator wired through the VOX
relay’s normally open contacts to
generate a tone and send it to a small
pillow speaker which would theoretically wake the snorer.
To accomplish this, I built a twotransistor multivibrator oscillator I’d
found a while ago on the Talking Electronics website and had previously
used as a basic square-wave generator.
It is simple and works well, and it is
easy to change the output frequency if
required. I built it onto a small piece
of Veroboard and by changing the value of two capacitors, fixed the output
frequency at around 2kHz. I didn’t
measure the frequency exactly, but as
it was a rather piercing tone – and all
without having to use an additional
amplifier stage – I was sure it would
do the job of waking anyone very close
to the speaker. I also added another pot
to allow volume adjustment of the oscillator’s output.
The relatively small oscillator board
would fit snugly inside the jiffy box I
got for the project and I would mount
everything into it once I’d proven the
concept. All that remained was to feed
9V from the power supply to the VOX
board and wire the oscillator output
through the relay and out to a mono
3.5mm jack socket that would eventually be mounted on one end of the box.
I would then plug my speaker into that.
The pillow speaker I had on hand is
a commercial model with a speaker of
about three inches diameter mounted
in a tapered, circular slim-line plastic
case so it can easily slip under a pillow without creating an uncomfortable lump. With oblong holes spaced
around the circumference, it looks a
bit like a UFO from one of those old
Gerry Anderson TV shows that were
all the rage in the 1970s.
With the project working electronically, it was time to put it to the test,
so I placed the whole mess of circuit
boards, flying leads and pots on a side
table beside our bed and rigged up the
pillow speaker, warning my wife of
the upcoming trials. It would be fine
lying in a mess on the table – as long
as it worked!
I powered it up with a surplus 9V
DC plugpack and settled down to try
some sensitivity tests.
However, right off the bat I could
see there was going to be “issues”. In
the dead of night, when all through
the house, not a creature was stirring,
not even a mouse, when the oscillator
went off, it sounded like an air-raid siren to anyone in the room!
If I backed the volume off to be so
quiet that my wife couldn’t hear it, it
was too quiet and I doubted it would
wake up the snorer either. Another issue with my prototype was the relay;
with it clicking away every time the
sound switch was activated, even that
mechanical noise in the middle of the
night was far too disturbing for others.
And when I cranked up the sensitivity in order for the microphone to pick
up some fake ‘snores’, it would activate
the relay and the sound of the relay
would activate the VOX and it would
then get into a loop and chirp like crazy.
If this thing was going to fly, it was going to need further thought! The theory
was sound or at least, I thought it was
sound. The obvious thing was to find a
quieter relay and I’d have to ditch the
oscillator. Instead of an oscillator and
speaker, I could use a vibrating buzzer,
like the ones used in mobile phones.
I had a few of these tiny devices
sitting in the workshop and so I set
out to see what I could do with them.
These phone buzzers are simply a tiny
DC motor with an imbalanced weight
mounted on the rotor shaft. When 5V is
applied, the motor spins quite quickly
and as it is solidly mounted into the
phone’s frame, it vibrates to indicate
Servicing Stories Wanted
Do you have any good servicing stories that you would like to share in The Serviceman column? If so, why not send those stories in to us?
We pay for all contributions published but please note that your material must
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Please be sure to include your full name and address details.
60 Silicon Chip
a call or other haptic feedback events.
It should be simple enough to fashion a vibrating ‘pillow speaker’ and this
also had the advantage of simplifying
the device, as I could dispense with the
oscillator side of it altogether and simply pick 5V from a point in the VOX circuit to run through relay contacts and
the ‘speaker’ cable to power the motor.
With that in mind, I set about modifying the snore machine. I tried various relays, most of which had different pin connections and so wouldn’t
fit in the board. Most clicked, some
louder and some quieter but none I
tried were suitable.
No doubt there are ultra-quiet mechanical relays out there or I could utilise an electronic relay, but the cost and
complexity of going down that road
started overtaking the original simple
idea of the project.
I ended up sticking with the original
relay but made a ‘cosy’ for it out of foam
rubber and insulation tape. Fortunately,
I had room on the PCB to add the cover and a couple of layers of foam and
tightly-wound tape soon had the activation noise reduced to almost nothing.
I also mounted the whole thing in
the jiffy box and made up a remote
mount for the microphone, removing
it from the board and instead soldering
a 120mm length of heavy, enamelled
copper wire to a PCB pin I’d soldered
in the earth side, with the other end to
be soldered to the mic’s earth contact.
I then ran a length of insulated hookup wire up the side of the copper wire
from the live pad on the PCB to the
mic’s ‘live’ pad.
Before I soldered the mic on, I
pushed the wires through a hole I’d
drilled in the jiffy box for them, then reinforced the junction with some epoxy
resin and covered the exposed part of
the ‘stand’ with a couple of lengths of
heat-shrink tubing. With the mic soldered on, I covered that with pieces of
larger diameter heat-shrink and shrunk
it down to cover all the connections.
It ended up looking pretty neat, with
the mic on a now-movable boom, and it
was more isolated from whatever mechanical noise came from the jiffy box.
It could also now be directed toward
the snorer by gently bending the boom.
I modified the pillow speaker by taking it apart and removing the speaker,
then gluing the vibrating motor to the
bottom of the plastic case with another
dab of epoxy resin. Finally, I soldered
the old speaker wires to the motor
siliconchip.com.au
Editor’s Note
We actually published a much more recent VOX project in the July 2011
issue, titled “Build A Voice-Activated Relay (VOX)”, by John Clarke. An
Altronics kit is available (K5542) and we also stock the PCB in our Online Shop
(completed PCB shown below, not to size).
In this specific example, we suspect Dave Thompson missed the newer VOX
project because it was described as a “voice-activated relay” rather than “voiceactivated switch”. But searching for “VOX” would have found both projects.
If readers want to try Dave Thompson’s approach to detecting and stopping
snoring, the July 2011 design can be used without the relay since the BC337
used to drive the relay could easily switch the phone buzzer motor directly.
However, we would suggest changing the 10kΩ base resistor for the BC337
to 4.7kΩ and also connecting a 47Ω 1W resistor in series with the buzzer motor. No other changes to the circuit should be necessary.
before re-assembling the top cover.
Trials were much more satisfactory
and I was able to get the mic’s sensitivity up high enough to pick up the
slightest snore without noise from the
relay setting it off.
The unit, when assembled and sitting beside the bed, was almost silent in operation, and my wife could
no longer hear the relay clicking, nor
could she hear the buzzer going off
under my pillow. But it sounded quite
loud to me and had no problem waking me when something set the device
off (it can’t have been me snoring!).
One downside, which could perhaps be worked around with a more
directional microphone, was that
sounds such as the neighbour slamming their car door or giving a quick
toot on the car horn when driving off
also triggered the device, though those
sounds might have woken me anyway.
All it needed now was some field
testing, and so I passed it on to my
friend, who reported last time I saw
him that it worked well and there was
a lot less stress in the household now
that they were both getting a reasonable night’s sleep. Fixed!
It’s just not cricket
D. P., of Faulconbridge, NSW
siliconchip.com.au
employed all sorts of fancy methods
in an effort to track down an elusive
intermittent fault in a Beyonwiz DP-P1
set-top box/PVR. Here’s his story . . .
It all started one warm, humid day,
when my wife sat down to watch a
movie, only to find the projector displaying a very strange, multi-coloured
image. It was then that she noticed water dripping from our air conditioner
onto the cabinet containing our audiovideo equipment. She quickly turned
everything off and called me in to take
a look at the problem.
The air conditioner, a split-system
type, has a trough running along the
bottom of the indoor unit to catch
the water condensing on the heat exchanger. Unfortunately, the drain hose
attached to the end of the trough had
become blocked, causing the trough
to overflow.
Most of the water had gone down
the back of the entertainment cabinet
and into the set-top box (STB), a Beyonwiz DP-P1. This unit had copped
the worst of the flooding, with copious quantities of water lying on top of
its case and flowing out the bottom.
I quickly disconnected the power to
the cabinet and proceeded to mop up
as much of the water as I could. I then
took the STB outside, removed the
cover and emptied out the water. The
motherboard still had water on it but
someone must have been on my side,
because the water had all stayed at one
end of the board, well away from the
switchmode power supply. And as far
as I could see, there was no water on
the underside of the board.
There didn’t appear to be any damage from the flooding, so I carefully
soaked up as much of the remaining
water as I could and left the unit in
the sun to dry. I then brought the STB
back inside and powered it up. To my
relief, it booted up normally and all
seemed well.
It didn’t stay that way though. After a few hour’s operation, we began
to notice that off-air images were occasionally pixellating. This problem
got worse as time went on, the signal breaks eventually becoming long
enough to cause a “No Signal” warning to appear on the screen.
My first thought was that maybe I
hadn’t pushed the antenna plug in
properly and so, on the next signal
break, I gave the antenna plug a wriggle. It seemed to have been properly
seated but in any case, the signal immediately came good and seemed
stable.
However, I thought that water might
have found its way into the antenna
plug/socket, so I pulled the plug out
and sprayed it and the socket with
WD40. All seemed well after that, with
no more pixellation or signal breaks.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before
the problem appeared again. Once
again, wiggling the antenna connector
“cured” it, so I thought that I would
take a closer look at the antenna connector combination.
The first thing I did was to try feeding the STB from a different antenna
outlet. I ran a coax from another room
and once again, the problem appeared
to be cured. I then pulled the original
antenna plug apart, expecting to find
an intermittent short or open circuit.
However, everything looked fine and it
tested OK with a multimeter, so I put
the connector back together again and
plugged it back into the STB.
Once again, I was greeted with a
clean signal with no breaks but the
fault returned with a vengeance just
a few days later. In fact, the STB now
became so unreliable that it was now
pot luck as to whether or not it would
work on a particular day. And even if
it did, it wouldn’t work for long.
February 2017 61
Serr v ice
Se
ceman’s
man’s Log – continued
Further testing revealed that a TV
receiver plugged into the STB’s antenna feed performed perfectly, so the
fault was evidently in the STB itself. It
was time to set it up on the bench for
some serious troubleshooting.
I began by establishing that video
files recorded on the HDD before all
this had happened could be played
normally, even when the STB was in
the fault condition. This indicated that
the problem was confined to the RF
section but with the unit on the bench,
the fault stubbornly refused to appear
. . . most of the time. I thought that this
might be because the cover was off
but replacing it didn’t have any effect.
On the rare occasions that the fault
did appear, I tried heating, cooling
and flexing the motherboard. Sometimes these actions cleared the fault
and sometimes they didn’t. The “cure”
always seemed vague but I did eventually get the impression that it was more
sensitive in the vicinity of the tuners.
The DP-P1 has two tuners so that
one program can be watched while a
different program is being recorded.
These tuners are both branded LG and
are housed in small tin-plate boxes
with snap-on covers, with a row of pins
along the bottom edge. One of the tuners had two Belling-Lee connectors,
for RF input and RF output, while the
other tuner had no connectors.
I later discovered that the tuner with
the connectors is designated the “master” and the other tuner, the “slave”.
Apparently either tuner can be used for
direct viewing or recording, the logic
circuitry in the STB sorting out which
tuner will be used for which task on
any particular occasion.
By now, I thought it was a fair bet
that I had a tuner fault, although other
possible culprits were the power supply and the logic controlling the tuners.
Snapping the covers off the two tuners revealed that they were quite similar internally, the main difference being
that the slave lacked the two BellingLee connectors. It also lacked the amplifier circuit which evidently fed RF
to the output socket and (presumably)
to both tuner circuits. However, most of
the circuitry in the two tuners looked
identical, so I thought that some voltage comparisons might give me a clue.
I started with voltage measurements
at the pins along the edges of the tun62 Silicon Chip
er boards. In the non-faulty condition, the voltage readings were virtually identical between the two tuners.
However, it was a different story with
the fault condition. Most of the readings were the same but one was very
different.
In the “good” tuner, the reading on
a particular pin was about 6V but in
the “bad” tuner, it was around 0V and
varying slightly. I traced the circuit
back from this pin and this led me to
believe that it was probably the tuning
voltage but I really needed more data.
A internet search for information on
these LG tuners draw a blank. However, both were based around a UN6034
IC and I had more luck finding information on this device, a quick search
revealing a comprehensive data sheet
and an application note.
It turned out that the UN6034 IC is
virtually a complete digital TV front
end. It contains no less than three
separate voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) and associated mixers
(one for each of the three TV bands),
the logic circuitry for switching between them, a programmable phase
locked loop (PLL) for referencing the
VCOs, a charge-pump circuit to generate the relatively high (33V) VCO tuning voltage, and an IF amplifier capable of driving a surface acoustic wave
(SAW) filter.
In addition, the chip incorporates
various associated functions, including AGC and lock detectors.
As far as I could see, the circuitry
around the UN6034 in the tuners conformed quite closely to the application
note, so by using the information in the
application note, there was a chance I
could track down the cause of the volt-
age difference between the two tuners.
Assuming that what I had measured
was indeed the tuning voltage, then
according to the data sheet, I should
have measured somewhere between
0.4V and 33V over the full VCO tuning range.
I was now beginning to suspect that
the VCO in the master tuner wasn’t
running. Either that or it was well out
of range. But how to check it?
The digital TV channels in my area
are in the high VHF range, so the local
oscillator (or VCO) should be running
at the RF input frequency plus or minus the IF. My old analog scope would
not be in the race at these frequencies
but an RF probe that I use with my
Heathkit VTVM (now converted to
solid state) would probably tell me if
the oscillator was running (but not if
it was on the correct frequency).
The SAW filter in each tuner was
marked EPCOS X7253D which, from
an EPCOS data sheet, I determined to
have a 36MHz centre frequency, so I
figured that this must be the IF. I reckoned that if the STB was tuned to our
local ABC transmitter on 226.5MHz,
then the local oscillator (LO) would
be on either 262.5MHz or 190.5MHz,
depending whether it was above or
below the RF input.
I then figured that I should be able to
detect the local oscillator signal with
my hand-held scanner. With the STB
tuned to the ABC frequency, I took a
punt that the LO frequency was above
the input. My guess was correct – with
the scanner tuned to 262.5MHz and
a short piece of wire pushed into the
scanner’s antenna socket as a “sniffer”,
I immediately found a strong signal at
that frequency in the vicinity of the
IC and the oscillator coil in the nonfaulty condition.
By contrast, in the fault condition,
This photo shows
the two tuners in
the Beyonwiz DPP1 PVR. The red
arrow indicates
the position of the
cricket body that
was wedged under
the master tuner.
siliconchip.com.au
there was no LO signal and the RF
probe indicated no oscillator activity.
So what was killing the VCO in
the faulty tuner? According to the
data sheet, there are a number of
legitimate operating conditions that
can stop the VCO. In addition, a
component fault around the VCO,
a fault in the IC itself or a power
supply problem could do it.
In addition, the VCO locks only
when an input signal is present. Loss
of RF would thus also kill the VCO, so
the problem could be due to a loss of
RF into the UN6034.
This would need to be investigated
but how to do it? My trusty scanner
could certainly tune to the RF input
frequency but it has a 50Ω input impedance, so it would be unsuitable for
signal tracing the high-impedance circuitry in the tuner.
In any case, I found that tuning it to
a digital TV frequency with an antenna
connected produced nothing useful.
Even on its widest-bandwidth setting,
it could not resolve anything meaningful. What I needed was a wide-band
receiver that could decode a digital
TV signal. Pondering this, I suddenly realised that I had one on the shelf
right in front of me – an ordinary digital TV receiver!
But what about its input impedance?
75Ω was better than 50Ω but still not
good enough. After some more pondering, I hit on the idea of using a 1/4wave matching section. If I stuck to
one frequency and cut a piece of coax
to a 1/4-wavelength of that frequency,
it would transform the 75Ω input to
a high impedance. I wasn’t exactly
sure how high but maybe it would be
high enough.
The wavelength of an electromagnetic signal in free space is given by
the formula:
λ=v÷f
where: λ is wavelength, v is the velocity (300,000km/s) and f is the
frequency in Hz. Plugging the ABC
transmitter frequency into this formula gives: λ = 300,000 ÷ 226,500,000
= 0.001324503km ≈ 1.3245m. So a
1/4-wavelength would be 0.3311m.
I planned to use RG59 coax which
has a velocity factor of 0.659. Applying
the velocity factor gives 0.3311 x 0.659
= 0.2182, or approximately 218mm.
Accordingly, I fitted a connector
to a piece of RG59 coax and cut it to
218mm, including the connector. On
the open end, I soldered a very short
siliconchip.com.au
clip lead to the braid to make a ground
connection to the tuner. A 10pF capacitor with very short leads was then
connected to the inner conductor to
act as a DC blocker and probe. It was
all a bit rough but it worked!
In the non-fault condition I found
that I was able to successfully trace the
RF signal from the STB’s input connector, through the RF stages and right up
to the input pin of the IC, all without
upsetting the operation. Apparently
the input impedance of my matching
section was high enough to do the job.
However, once again my sense of
having achieved something was to be
short-lived. The next time the fault
appeared, I found that RF was not
reaching the IC and as before, the LO
was not running. At this point I was
stumped; this was a real chicken-andegg situation.
After all this, I still couldn’t tell
whether I had a VCO problem or a loss
of RF. At this point, replacing the tuner
seemed to be the next logical step but
new tuners were unavailable as far as
I could determine. The only way out
would be to purchase a non-working
DP-P1 set-top box on eBay, maybe one
with a dead hard drive, with the hope
of salvaging a good tuner from it.
And then, as I was staring gloomily
at the motherboard, I saw something
I hadn’t noticed before. Hidden just
underneath the suspect tuner was a
small black blob of something. It was
hard to see because there were only a
couple of millimetres of clearance under the tuner.
I gently poked at the blob with a
toothpick and it seemed quite soft, as
though it was something organic. Further digging then brought out a sad
little pile of exoskeletal remains and
decomposing soft tissue.
It was hard to tell what it was (or
had been) but I am pretty sure it was
the body of a species of tiny cricket
that is common here during summer.
These little critters are small enough
to climb through fly screens and often
come into the house in hot weather
looking for water.
Certainly, they are small enough to
get into the STB through its ventilation holes. In this case, the little body
had been lodged between the motherboard’s ground plane and one of the
tuner’s pins. Guess which pin . . . yes,
it was the tuning voltage pin! There
was a nice film of corrosion where the
body had been and with this cleaned
up, there was no sign of signal breakup, so I set it up for a soak test.
The Beyonwiz STB performed faultlessly for several days and so was put
back into service. It has continued
working for without fault for several
months now.
Evidently, the leakage path caused
by the dead cricket was enough to kill
the VCO. Ironically, the cricket itself
was probably killed by the VCO in the
first place. If you’re that small, maybe
33V is more than enough to do the job!
And the reason for the intermittent
nature of the fault? It seems that the
resistance of the leakage path fluctuated with humidity.
Sherwood CDC-5090R/G CD player
A simple fault could have led to an
expensive CD player being ditched.
Instead, J. W., of Hillarys, WA fixed it
for just a few dollars.
A friend rang and asked if I could fix
his Sherwood 5-disc CD player. When
I got it, I plugged it in and found that
although the display was working
and the disc was being loaded and
“played”, no audio was coming from
the rear RCA sockets.
I searched the net for a circuit diagram to no avail and then I remembered a business called High Country
Service Data. I left a request on their
website and Steve (the owner) rang me
a short time later with the news that
he had a circuit diagram but no service manual. This was certainly better than nothing and so I purchased a
copy from them ($4) and it arrived five
minutes later via email.
The circuit showed that the RCA
sockets were fed from op amp IC701
which was supplied with ±8V. So the
first step would be to check the voltages around this IC.
I removed the covers and found that
I was able to stand the CD carousel on
its end to get to the main PCB. I quickly identified IC701 and found that the
-8V supply rail measured only -5V, so
I then moved on to the power supply
section of the circuit. This revealed
that IC102, a 7908 voltage regulator,
was supposed to supply the -8V rail.
It looked OK and wasn’t getting hot
due to overload so I replaced it with
one from my box of spares.
That solved the problem and I now
I had a clean audio signal at the RCA
sockets. My friend was delighted as
a replacement for this particular unit
would cost about $500.
SC
February 2017 63
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