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In August I was bringing older computers back into operation and wound up needing a newer monitor and picked up a "newer" monitor in the form of a rather old 15 inch LCD that did 1024x768. That got pressed into service as my main monitor for a while as in early September my 19 inch LCD (1280x1024) quit. Before I got to attempting repairs, I wound up upgrading to a nice 23 inch LCD with LED backlight (1920x1080).
Last week I finally got around to re-reading a thread on the Bad Caps forum regarding problematic Samxon capacitors in the Samsung SyncMaster 930B and then ordered some new (and hopefully much better) capacitors.
The new capacitors arrived yesterday. They were installed this morning. The old monitor works again. It took longer than I hoped, but it wasn't anything actually difficult, just a bunch of fiddly stuff. I'm really glad I took several pictures of the monitor as I took it apart those weeks ago. They took a lot of guesswork out of re-assembly.
...do you remember when we
Stayed up all night to get
Pittsburgh on a crystal set? -- Dearie
I received a "Rocket Radio" crystal set as a gift some time ago and didn't do anything with it until recently. I'm not sure why I delayed so long. Anyway, I strung up the antenna wire and connected it, and was a bit surprised at the set not having a place for a proper ground connection. Curiously, the instructions suggested using a metal cold water pipe as an antenna. What? That's a ground connection, if you can find such plumbing nowadays.
At first I heard nothing, no matter how much I tuned around. I tried again in the evening as the AM band picks up after nightfall. Sure enough, I heard something faint. But something wasn't quite right. I couldn't place it until I heard the station ID. It was KFMC, the local FM station. It didn't matter where I tuned. I seemed to have an antenna and no tuning to speak of (well, evidently just enough somewhere for slope detection to work) and got only the strongest signal around - even if it was about 100 MHz too high.
That makes me wonder what I heard on crystal sets in the 1970s. Then I also would only get one local station. But which band? Back then stations still could simulcast on AM and FM, and WJMT did.
In the 1980s I had an interesting experience with a "radio" that really lacked any tuner as such. It was length of antenna wire, a ground connection, a detector (roughly, the bit that converts from radio to audio -- in a crystal set, that's what the crystal does), and an audio amplifier. With no selectivity, it picked up pretty much everything at once. Mostly it picked up stronger shortwave broadcasts.
Only getting the local FM station on a crystal set tuned for the AM band is disappointing. I suppose at least it picked up something besides the local RF hash of the computer(s). Still, it'd be nice to pick up a station in the right band. And I don't expect to get Pittsburgh.
