Gregg wrote:
I asked them and never received a response which was kind of
surprising in how good they usually are in answering emails. Are you
familiar enough with what I'm asking - is it even possible? I know it
can't be for the lack of room because the 909 is a portable and the
394 is a desktop. Can't hurt to ask you - no one else knows
apparently. :-)

I had to go find a service manual for it to answer this one. There is a
row of surface mount LEDs soldered to the logic board. On top of this is
an LCD screen. The manual goes into no detail, so I have no idea of how
it is mounted or connected.

If, and I say if, the LCD is just stuck on there with some tape or glue, and is
connected to the circuit board with a cable, then you could probably remove
it without damage, and replace the LED's with another color. or put an
opaque strip over them and a new strip with a different color. That may be a
little more difficult because you have to find a place to draw power from.

Then you just stick the LCD back in place and it works. :-)

More likely the LCD is instead soldered to the board. It may be surrounded
by a metal shield as LCD's are very noisy electricaly and it could interfere
with your reception. The shield may be soldered to the board too.

Removing soldered on shields is difficult and removing soldered on LCD's is
time consuming, which translates to expensive.

By my count, there are at least 28 pins or connections on the bottom of the
LCD.

So I expect that the cost of replacing the LEDs is very high, far more
than the radio is worth. When the radio was relatively new, if you needed
to replace the LCD or an LED, you would just get a new logic board
from Radio Shack.

Now you would have to find a dead radio with a working logic board, such
as one that had the front end destroyed by lightening and use that.

I hope that answers your question.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation.
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.