Electronics – Page 5 – AB4UG Radioblog

Power supply: Out to the control board

I’ve finished tracing the power supply schematic out to the control board. I’ll go through it once or twice more to make sure I’ve got everything right, but I think I’ve got a fairly complete schematic of the power supply now.

Here’s the schematic so far.

I did run into an anonymous transistor type part with a red case that I wasn’t able to identify. Whatever markings were on it have been rubbed off, so there’s no way to really identify it anymore.

The base of the transistor (I’m assuming it’s the base anyway) is connected to pin 10 of the 723 voltage regulator while the emitter is connected to the bases of the power transistors. The collector goes to pin 12 of the 723 and the collectors of the power transistors. Checking with schematics for my Astron RS-35, there’s a TIP29 transistor in roughly the same spot, so I’m reasonably confident this mystery part is an NPN transistor of some kind.

Tracing out the control board was a bit tricky, but I think I managed to get it right (I think I’m missing the diode on the schematic though). I’ll need to recheck where the wires coming off the control board go in the rest of the power supply.

Quite impressed with the way this power supply was put together. Everything is soldered or screwed together nice and cleanly, and the wires are nicely dressed and bundled together with zip ties and string.

Except for the blown fuse, I don’t see anything obviously wrong with the power supply. I think I will look into replacing that AC input plug though before I try applying power to this thing.

Power supply: Power transistors

I’ve traced the power supply schematic past the SCR and out to the power transistors that are attached to the big heat sink. This part of the schematic might be a little questionable because a lot of the wires are covered up or obscured by other components and a little harder to follow.

The schematic so far:

I’m up to the control board now. It’s small, but has a lot of wires coming in and out of it. Fortuantely it’s all point to point wiring on perfboard, so I don’t have to follow any PCB traces.

Power supply project: Input and filtering

Tracing out a schematic for this power supply has been pretty fun so far. It’s also been a good excuse to learn how to use KiCad.

So far I’ve made it past the rectifier and filtering capacitors up to the power transistors. I’m pretty impressed with the way the innards of this thing are put together. The bridge rectifier part took me a bit to figure out until I realized there were two different stud mount diodes in it.

I’ve come across a couple types of components that took me some searching to figure out what they were (still not quite sure what one of them is). This one in particular is one I haven’t been able to identify.

It’s connected to one of the outputs of the bridge rectifier and the control board at the top. At the bottom it’s connected to an air core inductor and parts that lead to the 2N5886 power transistors. A Google search of the numbers printed on it take me to a single page at a store that has it listed as a rectifier diode.

This is the schematic I’ve cobbled together so far. Things start to get a bit confusing after the rectifier, but I think it’s reasonably accurate.

I wasn’t able to find symbols for everything in the KiCad library, particularly for the connectors, so I just used something that looked reasonable.

This has been a fun exercise so far. The power transistor section will probably take me a while to figure out.

Power supply project

The dead power supply I picked up at the TARC swap meet last year has been sitting in a couple of closets for the past year, and now I’m finally getting around to poking around inside.

The innards of the power supply look pretty good. Everything looks pretty clean, no scorch marks, and hardly any dust.

Looking at the back panel doesn’t inspire much confidence though. Looks like at some point someone soldered a regular power cable to the original (I think) AC input and covered it with heat shrink. I might have to do something about that when I start working on the power supply.

So far everything looks in pretty good shape. Not sure what the problem with it is (aside from a blown fuse), but before I dive in and start mucking around, I’m going to see if I can reverse engineer a schematic for the power supply. There aren’t any labels on the power supply so I can’t look anything up. Should be a fun exercise.

Mystery component

At some point in the recent past, probably at a hamfest, I acquired these red square components.

I’m sure whoever I bought them from at the time told me what they were and that I thought they’d be something I could make use of. However, I neglected to label the bag with any information about them, probably because I figured I could find info about them online.

Silly me.

Fast forward to the future and I come across them again during another round of the “Organize the closet” game.

According to the printing on the components, they’re some kind of wide band transformer made by the Vari-L company. I’m guessing 9531 is the part number, and Z-Match is a model or branding for this part. No idea what the HF:112 might refer to.

They’re 0.5″ square by 0.25″ tall with 6 pins spaced 0.2″ apart (they fit nicely into a breadboard).

The numbering of the pins seems a little odd to me, but what do I know.

My Google-fu hasn’t yielded any useful results about the component itself, although I did find out the company was sued by the SEC in 2001 for financial reporting fraud and sold its assets to another company in 2002.

No idea how far back these parts date to, but considering the company history, it’s likely these little red squares are old enough that there won’t be much info online.

Using my multi-meter to probe the pins, I found that pins 1-3 and 2-4 are connected, while pins 5 and 6 don’t appear to be connected to anything. I guess my next step will be to put some kind of signal through and see what comes out the other end.

Update: Thanks to Thomas/LA3PNA for pointing me to a datasheet for the part (his Google-fu is strong). It turns out the 9531 is a date code (Week 31 of 1995) and HF:112 is the part number. Naturally, an obsolete part which Mouser shows as being manufactured by Qorvo, while the data sheet shows Sirenza Microdevices. The specs on the datasheet are consistent with the parts that I have. Thomas also suggests that they would probably be useful in an transceiver, so it’s doubly nice to know I have potential uses for them.