Yes, for many electronic appliances it ultimately comes down to a
cost-to-repair vs cost-to-replace comparison. And since the relative
price of most new electronic goods continues to drop many older
electronic appliances become disposable.
I remember my parents taking household appliances like a tube-powered
clock radio or a mixer in for repair. Today if the appliance dies it
is just replaced. I'm trying to think of where a TV, Radio or small
appliance repair shop might be in my area, but I'm drawing a complete
blank. Times have changed.
running dogg wrote:
Michael Lawson wrote:
wrote in message
ups.com...
wrote:
My wife and son are both E.E.'s and their explanation is that
IC's
begin to degrade slowly as a result of impurituies in the
wafer.
Simple components like capacitors dry out and resistors begin
to
open
up. Wish I knew more, but I can hear what they tell me in the
radios
I've owned. I owned one of the comparison radios, the
Panasonic
RF5000b. Big beast of a 24 pound radio with four antennas. It
was
pretty insensitive by any measure. Sure it would catch the big
nighttime SW's but that was about it. Other radios, such as a
Radio
Shack DX150b were still pretty sensitive (and still raspy
sounding)
after 25 years, so the rate of degradation isn't a constant.
Do a net search on "eletro-migration".
Over time the electrons carry some of the ions that make
junctions either P or N. Electro-migration increases with heat,
I think it doubles for every 3C degree increase. This is why
overclocking CPUs cn lead to unexpected failures.
So, does that mean it might not be a bad idea to
do some restoration work (or have it done) on
the newer radios when they reach 20 years or so,
sort of like the older tube radios?? I imagine that
the caps last longer than the old paper caps or black
beauties, but fixing up an R-70 or an FRG-7700 (if
in otherwise decent shape) hadn't occured to me before.
You can't restore ICs, of course, but you can replace auxilary
transistors, capacitors, resistors, etc. I know that some of the
older
transistorized clock radios (the ones made in Japan prior to the
microchip age) tended to have the radio die gradually over time. This
happened prior to the motor which flipped the numbers dying. I know
that
happened to an old 1971 Juliette which was my first radio. The radio
gradually got weaker and weaker and finally went silent, then the
numbers stopped turning. Those clock radios were pretty cheaply made
and
were not worth restoring, but a tabletop SW radio like a 7700 would
definitely be worth restoring if it was otherwise pretty good.
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