wrote:

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.

This is true. The only exception to this that I can think of would be
limited market electronics like tabletop SW radios. I've had my Yaesu
FRG-8800 fixed twice since I bought it. It arrived with a broken
freq/clock switch, since it was packed in wadded up newspaper. It also
had a certain resistor die (apparently a common problem) a couple years
after that. The cost to fix both these problems, and the cost to buy it
used of course (about $200, what I paid for the 2010 that I traded for
it) is still far less than the cost of a new Drake R8B. But tabletops
are the exception to the rule. Most mass market consumer electronics are
disposable, a trend that started in the 50s with the first transistor
radios. Computers, on the other hand, are still worth fixing, at least
until they get truly obsolete. And computers are different in that they
have software problems even if they don't have any hardware problems.

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.

In an era when consumer electronics are so cheap, when you can get a
clock radio for $7.99, it doesn't make any sense to have stuff fixed. I
was looking through newspaper microfilm of papers printed when I was
born (1974), and I came across an ad for an IC run Panasonic clock
radio-for $39.95! That was a lot of money 30 years ago. Today, the
maximum you'll spend for an all digital, two alarm Sony clock radio is
$25, even though the dollar has lost much of its value, and if you want
to go to Kmart you can get a clock radio for much less, as I noted. Even
TVs are cheap-a 20" color TV costs about $150, compared to twice that in
1974.



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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