Joel and Jim worked night shift this weekend and had today off,  so I hitched a ride with Paul.

Mike ordered a replacement regulator from E-bay for the standby diesel power plant.  Until it arrives and without a working regulator, there will be no broadcasts in the event of a power failure.  With this prospect and since Jim and Joel were not here to work on connecting the antenna switches, I decided to see if there was any possibility of repairing the failed regulator.

Someone had already begun to chip away at the potting material around what looked like the sensing circuitry, but I figured the most likely failure might be in the higher current circuits, probably on the right side of the voltage regulator.  After removing the first layer, an extra heat sink began to appear.

After shifting into ‘archeological dig’ mode, the first power device was finally exposed.

Eventually, three power devices were ‘unearthed’ that were all attached to the extra heat sink. The two on the left tested OK, but the rectifier bridge on the right had a dead short on one of its four diodes.

The faulty bridge was successfully removed and replaced with four discrete diodes.

After the ‘repair’ was completed, we had just enough time to install and test the regulator in the standby power plant.  Unfortunately, the regulator’s 5 amp fuse blew immediately!  Now when we checked, the diodes were OK, but the other two power devices had both failed.  Our attempt was not successful, but at least we tried!