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It's Alive!


....finally.

Had one of those deeply depressing situations last night when I first put power to it: no voltage on the outputs, no LED illumination, no nothin'. 120v at the IEC filter pins, so incoming voltage there, good fuse, and 120v to the transformer. But at the board inputs (hot to ground) I was getting 36v. Huh? Transformer should be at 14v wired in series. That's when I discovered the secondary lead wires were coated. The ends are tinned by the factory, but when you cut them back (for neatness) like I did, you're down to enameled wires. No burning it off with a soldering iron either (yes, I tried) -- gonna need a solder pot which I don't have. Fortunately I had purchased 2 transformers, so I popped in the other with the secondary leads at full length, and life arose from nothingness. Then came tuning for the output voltage. With this design, it's a matter of finding the right zener diode. Same value, but apparently there is a wide variation in tolerance on these, so it's down to swapping different ones until you find the right one. Wish it was as easy as Manny's with a trim pot. :) Not exactly 9 volts, but that's as close as I could get with the zeners I had to try. Don't think it will matter with the Remedy reclocker -- the factory wall wart puts out 9.16, and the iPower puts out 9.26 (both unloaded values though). What's nice with this AMB supply though is that I'm getting 9.11 volts unloaded, and the exact same 9.11 volts loaded down pretty well with a 50 ohm resistor across the outputs. Now time for some listening, but I'll let it break in for a bit first. Hope it was worth the effort!














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Topic - It's Alive! - bcowen 12:28:14 11/12/16 (16)

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