This is tenth in a series of articles which will help you to save
money.
Our local post office is under new management. The new owners moved
here from the far south (Reading, near France, I think). They
employed a local satellite expert to refit their system and
everything seemed all right. However, they accosted me one morning as
I was posting my mail orders for the day. Apparently Sky News and
other channels were much more sparkly than they had been in Reading.
Was this to be expected here, near Crewe, and did they need a bigger
dish?
Now, I'm no installation expert but everyone else here is using a
60cm dish so why should the Post Office need a larger one? I had a
quick look outside. The installer had made a neat job of fitting it
but it was immediately obvious that the old dish was bent out of true
by at least an inch!
I arranged for a new dish to be fitted and all was well. My question
is: why did a "professional" installer fail to notice that this dish
was bent?
In a previous article, I mentioned that CPC now handle Amstrad
spares. It seems that now they also handle Grundig spares, including
warranty claims. In the long term this is certain to improve the
service but, at the time of writing, some spares are not in stock. I
had to hand back a GRD300 to the customer because I simply could not
obtain a new microcontroller chip.
In this respect I prefer to deal with Pace receivers. They may not be
as reliable as some others but at least I can get the parts and, in
the rare event that I can't repair a receiver, Pace will do it for me
with a rapid turnaround.
Last week I had a call from the owner of an MSS1000-IP receiver. He
was rather distraught because the shop where he bought it had quoted
a rather high sum for its repair and three to four weeks to do the
job. It was less than six months old but he could not find the
invoice. I advised the customer to contact Pace Returns department
and to quote the serial number. He phoned me four days later to say
that Pace had collected the receiver, repaired and returned it free
of charge and it was now back on the shelf working better than ever.
OK, I didn't make any profit on this one but the gentleman is
spending every evening in the club telling his friends what a
splendid service I (and Pace) gave him. And we did!
Another point which I find refreshing is that Pace seem to be totally
open about faults which occur through design or manufacturing
problems. A lot of resources are committed to the technical help line
and, whereas most companies put the emphasis on marketing the
product, Pace also look at the technical side. For example, in each
of the major countries where they will be selling digital receivers,
Pace have set up a service department to handle faults and problems
which inevitably occur with any new technology.
While we are on the subject of Digital Receivers, a lot of people ask
me how they should connect their D2Mac decoders to receive digital
MPEG-2 signals. The answer, of course, is that the two technologies
are quite different so you can't use D2Mac equipment to receive
digital signals. You will need a separate digital receiver which has
the conditional access unit, internal software and the smart card for
the particular programs that you want to watch. If you want to use
both analogue (including D2Mac) and digital systems then the best way
is to fit a twin output "Universal" LNB to your dish. Be sure to use
high quality cable and do not kink or join it along its length. You
can even have a motorised system with a twin output Universal LNB.
(Skew adjustment with a polariser is really not necessary unless you
are looking for very weak signals.) This way you get the best
possible compromise with two systems working together.
As most of you who do repairs will know, I have designed power supply
kits for over twenty different receivers including the PRD range.
Pace supply their own design kit in a black antistatic bag and,
generously, they include R2, a 100k/2W resistor, which I don't supply
in my kits. Unfortunately, this has led to some confusion in two
respects. Firstly, because R1 and R2 look physically similar, a lot
of "engineers" are fitting the 10 Ohm R1 in place of the 100k R2 with
disastrous and spectacular results! Secondly, the PRD "plus" range
uses two 47k resistors in place of a single 100k. Some clever
repairers fit the 100k in place of the 47k R2 which results in a
total resistance of 147k. The receiver will then tick like a clock
but it will not work. My simple advice is: do not replace R2 unless
it is definitely open-circuit!
During April, several power supplies failed immediately after repair.
The problem was traced to some BUT11A transistors which were marked
"C 932" so if you had similar problems, look closely at the
transistor.