T86
More painting of the aerial assembly, especially the hard to get at places. The aerials are on their back for this latest painting session. The two photos below show before and after painting of the waveguide assembly fed by the receiving dish.
LCP
Refitted the small telecoms unit on the test equipment mounting plate. A half hour job that took two hours! Reason, the golden rule of re inserting screws from removed units was not observed so could not find the original mounting screws. The photo below shows the comms which has been corrosion treated and repainted and the test equipment on the mounting plate.
The simulator had not been run for a few weeks so was switched on at the end of the day. Unfortunately a few faults were immediately apparent:
- The FT81 monitor gave no display so the boot up process could not be monitored.
- Yet another power supply RIFA filter capacitor went up in smoke
- … and the simulator failed to boot
For the past few simulator sessions the FT81 had no vertical sync on switch on but eventually settled down, so is the ‘no display’ related? It has been removed for repair as has the 15V 8 Amp power supply.
The failure to boot appears to be an intermittent problem with the digital Output box but needs investigating further. The Argus was loading the software, according to its activity LEDs but without the FT81 it couldn’t be determined at which stage the boot up was stalling. Possibly reseating cards will fix but with limited time this will be a job for the next visit.
Simulator Booting
The green LED on the ME1461 flickers on loading software as is normal and the processor LEDs then look to be in a loop waiting for something. There are no LEDs on any of the Digital output cards and the displays were showing the firmware display – no Bloodhound boot display. When fiddling about removing the FT81 I turned around and the Bloodhound boot display had magically appeared, there were also a total of three LEDs on a couple of Digital Output cards. A reboot simply showed the firmware display again and no boot up display. On the occasion when the boot display did show I pressed the Simulator button but nothing happened. Finally; when the boot displays appeared the Mode Change Not Allowed message was NOT present which means the Argus is seeing the required inputs. All four CHARGE channels are also OK. I don’t think the power supply with the blown RIFA is responsible. Problem with the PeriBus card on the digital output box (maybe).
Pete H
BMPG 