broken fob button

[LC]

I have a garage gate fob (DKS brand) that opens 2 gates, one of the buttons (micro tactile switch) isn't working. I gently pried off the non-functioning button and soldered on a new one, thinking that would fix it, but no. Could it be something with the soldering job, or is it more likely to be a different problem? The original fobs for the building are about a decade old now, and other people here are having the same issue.

[basinstreetdesign]

My guess is the fob battery has finally drained flat.  You should petition the building rental office/managers to organize new ones for you and everybody else.

[Nusa]

You can presumably test the low battery theory, if you haven't already.

The other possibility, especially if others are experiencing the same problem with the same gate, is that the problem is on the receiving side, not a fob problem at all.

[wilfred]

If it is a multi button fob then if other functions work it isn't the battery. I have one (ATA PTX-4) for which non-genuine replacements are as cheap as dirt on Ebay. However the one I had was affected by corrosion internally. Perhaps it got rained on once too often. I tried resoldering a new switch and that didn't work but tracing out the PCB and shorting two other points did work so I put it aside assuming somewhere a trace was broken. Bought a new one.

10 years is about the life of these things in daily use. The translucent blue plastic on the ones we have is prone to getting brittle and the rubber over the buttons also gets stiff.

If it has a button for a little used function you can do without then reprogram it to the function you lost.

[Clint_dk]

Make sure that you soldered the new switch in correctly, especially if its those small square ones. Turn it another 90 degrees and try again.