Well.....it is solid state

[saturated]

Hey guys
Treading lightly here
I'll be glad to take this somewhere else  you have been far beyond patient

Anyhow I got this realistic weatheradio 12-181A that probably hasn't been powered up in at least ten years

Anyhow I put a battery in it (9v) and it works  but I could tune it (it goes from 162.4-162.55 Mhz) and adjust the volume to get some guy talking about seas and barometric pressure etc but as soon as I set it down it was like opening a door to a raging typhoon 🌀 white noise sound 

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I could repeat that a times then after that nothing but solid white noise.

I guess I need to open it up and see if there's anything blaringly obvious 

Oh yeah I need to find a schematic too

[g1]

Check for corrosion on battery contacts, then start with cleaning the pots.

[joecool85]

Check for corrosion on battery contacts, then start with cleaning the pots.

I'm voting it's an issue with dirty pots.

[saturated]

Thanks guys I have another realistic radio from that era (am fm) and it works good but you have to act like a member of a bomb diffuser unit tweaking the volume knob very similar barrage of white noise

[saturated]

I'm fixing to get on this I kinda figure I'll have to desolder the pot and disassemble 

Anyhow I didnt really have any stuff on hand so I got this I was gonna see what you thought

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[saturated]

Ok guys I got this thing apart finally

I know it's probably easy temptation to spray some stuff into the holes what do you think

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Not much entry on the other side

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Looks like if I have to desolder and remove those tabs look pretty easy to deal with

[saturated]

Idk if this would work but I have about a half gallon of it 

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Yeah I need to wash my Bronco 

[g1]

Both those products are great degreaser/contact cleaners, but leave no residue or lubricant behind.  They would both be very good for things like cleaning switch contacts, or flux removal from circuit boards.
So the CRC would be ok to clean the pots, but should be followed up with some kind of lubricant.  There should be some kind of holes or slots in the other side (metal) of those pots, usually near the lugs.
The trichloro is something like what we used to clean VCR heads with (TF cleaner).  It was phased out due to being environmentally unfriendly.

[saturated]

Yes sir thanks I actually went ahead and sprayed a bit of the crc stuff in the rear of each pot and turned them a bit then reassembled and tried it.  And it crackled at first but then worked pretty good for about a minute  but then the unrepellable whooosh returned and stayed 

So I have an idea that since it seems to work whenever I turn it on if it's been off for a while (like days) then it has to be a bad capacitor because being off for an extended period lets it discharge but then when it gets turned back on it works good until the bad capacitor charges up and starts leaking (or whatever my unfounded theory suspects it does)

So I'm tempted to start changing 🚼 caps but I have to remember

WE DON'T REMOVE OR REPLACE ANYTHING UNTIL WE HAVE A GOOD REASON TO SUSPECT THAT WE NEED TO

so meanwhile I suppose I need to get some liquid fader lube and look for another way in or prepare to desolder remove and open up and clean.

Also I'm trying to propose to myself  why a scratchy pot sounds scratchy maybe it's because it is failing to make good contact and signal or whatever is arcing and being distorted ? 

[saturated]

Well I was pretty stoked at work getting a plan to use my peavey rage 108 for a signal tracer 

I figured I could poke around and maybe I would get lucky and manage to touch at least one solder bead in a sea of many that  would yield clean unmodulated signal and produce the sound of AI voice forecasting weather.
Then from there I could find where the clean signal deteriorated and place a component under surveillance 
But it was not to be.  I had further hope when I realized it might help to have a capacitor in my probe chain but I had the same results.

I then hooked the signal generator to the antenna and probed around again to no avail.

I watched a few videos I may try some capacitor jumping.   


Oh yeah one weird thing that happened when I touched one pin of an IC the weather radio would broadcast the big local AM station but it only came out of the little radio speaker and not at all out of the peavey 

[saturated]

Well guys I've got great news 

And that is well if ya thought I was an idiot....you were right 

So I spent like two hours putting my multimeter on each capacitor lead which was difficult for the ones not close to the edge with everything packed in there 

I finally found one that didn't charge up when I probed each lead so I thought yep thats the bad one. I know it's not the way these guys are teaching me but yep that one's bad and I gotta do something 

So I was digging around in a bowl of components and stuff and found a 10 uf capacitor and started jumping capacitor leads in circuit to no avail.

Then (and yeah you're gonna whip my ass when you hear this) I saw another 9v battery in the bowl and it had Dec 2025 written on it in sharpie.  (I had to replace a smoke alarm and at first I replaced the battery and it didn't help so I just took the new battery out and put it in the bowl because the new smoke alarm came with a battery)

So I measured the battery that I have been using and it measured 5.7 volts.  And I was thinking nope thats not gonna make a difference because it still makes noise like loud static.

I measured the Dec 2025 battery....9.5 volts

So I put it in and the radio is working perfectly           

I guess that explains why it would work for about a minute then go into nothing but static mode.

So I'm sorry about that   

I was literally on the verge of shotgunning parts 

Repeat once again

WE DO NOT REMOVE OR REPLACE ANY COMPONENT(S) UNTIL WE HAVE A GOOD REASON TO BELIEVE THAT WE NEED TO DO SO

[joecool85]

So many times it is the most simple thing.  Glad you got it going!