Repair and Mods, Realistc DX-392

Started by jonisaacs, 02/10/2009 11:13AM
Posted 02/10/2009 11:13AM Opening Post
Hi: I just thought I would share some fun and joy I have had recently with my DX-392. This is a large portable that I bought from Jeff Kaiser at the ridiculous price of $35 shipped. There were a few cosmetic blems but the radio itself worked perfectly and I enjoyed the large controls and the very visible display. With an external antenna this dual conversion rig does a reasonable job of pulling in more distant stations.

This radio has a couple of annoying quirks. First, every time you tune enter or leave a band, it beeps loudly and it cannot be turned off... Solving this problem was as easy as opening the case, locating the offending beeper and disabling it. I made that mod several months ago.

But not long after, a minor disaster struck. The BFO became erratic and would not tune properly. I suspected a bad pot or maybe just a dirty pot so I disassembled the rig, I had to remove both the main board as well as the display board to get to the problem and when I did, I discovered that the problem was a cracked circuit board, the crack was rather large and went through several traces and under the pot for the BFO control... The radio went into a box and became a project, I figured it would wait until someday I just realized the obvious and gave it the heave ho...

But that was not to be. For some reason I woke up Saturday morning about 3:30 am and could think of nothing but fixing that radio. I went back to sleep but by 5 am I was awake, and was working away with my soldering iron, bridging the broken traces, resoldering the mounts for the pot. Some of the traces were small and I needed to use one pair of reading glasses on top of another to see what I was doing. But by 6am, the radio was fixed, I had the boards back in, all the cables connects and it wsa up and running.

Which brought me to the next annoyance... this is one of those radios that mutes when tuning so that bandscanning is very slow. I searched the web for a mod to disable the muting, and found one. It involved cutting a trace on the main board. With the confidence I had gotten from the repair, I tackled that job last night when I arrived home from work. The trace was easily accessed but difficult to see, I had to work under a magnifying glass. But it was soon done, the radio was back together and the mod actually worked !!! smile

Jon is a happy camper...