OK, then after another little shopping spree today to Asda to primarily get some washing powder, breakfast cereals and hand soap. Queued for an hour to be admitted, standing 2 metres apart, they were operating a system only allowing a certain number of people in and once that limit was reached, it was 1 out, 1 in. Limiting purchases to 3 of any one item per customer, I was able to get a small washing powder only (had about 6 left, so I only took 1) got some Weetos and a few other bits and bobs, again did not grab my full quota as I don't need them. Shelves were still bare when it came to TP, and they only had a limited range of products available so its going a long time to restore stocks.
Then I decided to investigate the Racal Dana 9082 RF generator I got off Gumtree. I already knew that it was not working, despite it having the appearance of actually working, display and meter all seemed to be working but zero output and some frequencies not being tunable.
Off comes the casing, this thing is well-built and heavy but when I opened it and examined it, I was horrified at what I found, this had 2 oscillators in it, 1 was the correct according to the SM, a 5MHz and some bleeding gorilla had bodged in another 10MHz one as well, co-ax's have been cut, some dodgy soldering and it possibly caused a short circuit, the whole thing is peppered with solder balls, broken connections and a blown resistor, even a couple of wires have soldered together and taped up.
It also turns out I'm reliably informed that this actually has many service manuals on it and I can only find the one, but the person who told me this, has furnished me with 2 layout drawings that do not appear in my manual so there must be some truth to his claim
I attach some photos of the various visual faults discovered so far and already I have uneasy feeling about this and wondering if it is repairable economically if I can locate these other manuals and wondering if anyone here has any info on these at all, or any internal photos that might assist me? The test point mentioned on the photos is where I tested for shorts because of the bad soldering.
It looks as if someone has been trying to modify it as it was not meant to have 2 reference oscillators fitted.
Heres the photos.