Greetings all, I normally maintain a couple of 'out-of-the-box' (Kendecom) repeaters, but recently I've been asked to help out with another system that is homebrewed from Micors. It consists of 4 Micors (TX on 2 meters, RX on 2 meters, TX on 440 and RX on 440) linked with a CAT-500 and a set of homebrew controls.
Lately, the 2 meter RX has become intermittent. For a while, I'd been able to either wiggle the plug on the front of the receiver or give the receiver a good whack and it'd come back to life, but lately it's become more and more obstinate. A couple of weeks ago, I brought the RX back to my shop and pulled all the boards, cleaned the pins and did my best to look for obvious problems. I really didn't see anything wrong, but when I reinstalled the RX, it work fine and I thought (after it ran for a couple of weeks) I must have fixed it. (I have no way of running it on the bench... so it was just a plug-and-pray fix.) Unfortunately, it crapped out again a couple of days ago, and this time reseating the plug and banging had no effect. One thing I did notice that I'd not seen before (it's hard to access the rear of the repeater) is that the plug (on the harness) is missing a piece of plastic surrounding the three pins nearest the hinged side of the handle. I haven't had time to pull up the drawings yet to see what those pins are, but I suspect that may be at the heart of my problem. At any rate, I'd like to be able to run this beast on my bench. Where can I come up with a harness and control, and what (if any) additional hardware would I need to be able to get this thing hooked up? Second, IF the harness plug IS the problem, what's the best course of action? Changing the plug looks like a real bugger. I haven't traced it up to the homebrew controls yet, so I'm not sure how difficult it'd be to swap out the entire harness (if I had one), but either way doesn't look like much fun. 73, Mike WM4B