Rick's b.log - entry 2025/06/14

A peaceful Saturday

Onward, mower!

I then washed my hair and did a load of laundry...but barely a load. It took many tries for the machine to be happy with the balancing in order to do the final spin.

I then saw that I had received a blog comment from Zerosquare who said:

That satellite receiver can probably be resurrected by replacing the bargain-bin electrolytic capacitors Metronic uses. Whether it's worth the time fixing it is debatable...

Satellite receiver repair

I mean, whip the thing open and look at the caps to see if I can spot anything looking wrong. It isn't as if I have anything to lose, right?

It didn't take long to notice a capacitor that stood out for being different looked slightly bulged, and underneath looked as if it was in the process of trying to shed its outer skin.

That blue cap doesn't look right.

Here it is from the other side with the board now removed from the receiver casing.

That blue cap really doesn't look right.

It's a one thousand microfarad ten volt (1000µF, 10V) low ESR capacitor. A look on Amazon gave me the exact same part for a shocking price, or five generic Chinese ones for a tenner.

But that didn't scratch my "could it be this?" itch. I wanted to look at this thing now. The instant dopamine hit of poking something with my soldering iron.

I have under the seat beside me three old MPEG-2 digital satellite receivers - one FreeSat, a Sky Digital, and a Sky Plus. They're pretty useless these days as they can't receive any of the HD channels.

I pulled open the Goodmans FreeSat box, purely because it was the one on top. A look at the power supply board showed me exactly what I wanted - a 1000µF, 10V capacitor. It didn't say low ESR, but it was in the power conditioning so I am guessing it would be good enough.

The power board of a Goodmans SD FreeSat receiver.

It became clear that the negative leg of these caps was connected to a ground plane, which meant that my little battery soldering iron was not going to cut it. So I got out the Lidl big iron and set it to 400V to make easy work of the ground plane. A quick dab to loosen each leg in turn to extract the capacitors, another dab and a poke with the solder-sucker to suck out excess solder and leave the holes open for the replacement part. The salvaged capacitor was put into place, double checking the polarity, and soldered into place.

I screwed the board back into place but left the lid off. Could that be it?

In a word: Success.

As you can see, it powered right up. ☺

The backup receiver is back in its box on the shelf, and the original repaired receiver is the one that is currently in use. And the HD4 that I ordered from Amazon will be arriving on Monday - so whether or not I can watch/record stuff from British TV is a worry that I can put to rest.

Thank you Zerosquare for giving me the suggestion and a push to doing something.

My unBirthday soon

For me, maybe tomorrow I'll bake some stuff. A nice cake? An instamatic cheesecake? Mmmm, I'm running low on cake in the freezer so that totally sounds like a plan.

Oh, and before I sign off and go make myself some linguine with non-deadly (I hope!) pepper, I would like to point out that nobody won the Euromillions jackpot yesterday. There is still the stupid-money amount of €250,000,000 up for grabs this coming Tuesday.

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Rob, 15th June 2025, 03:31

Happy u birthday! I spent a tenner on that euro draw, won nothing. I rarely do this, only when the jackpot is massive. Even though I know there's so little chance I'll win, it's good to dream..

A tree-dwelling mammal, 16th June 2025, 00:20

Rick - I remember you posting with some horror back in the Fidonet days about "omg, quarter of a century!"    What happened?    As in, how is it 2025, how are you over 50, and how am I less than three years from the big 5-0 now?

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