I’ve had a trouble free DCC 600 for four years.
I now have a DCC 900 I’m working on. It looks incredibly nice, with no scratches anywhere. It was visibly never opened before. So it would be a shame not to be able to fix it.
I’ve just replaced all capacitors on both boards.
Prior to this, I had DCC drop-outs and no analogue replay – no sound.
Now analogue is fine but I still get the infamous 00000000F I had before in service mode, and obviously errors are still showing.
My question is: is the head toast? I’m going to replace the AWM ribbon flat cable which was almost impossible to reuse because the pins were all detached from the ribbon, on both sides.
However, I very much doubt that the ominous F comes from that.
Thanks for any hints.
By the way, the head’s flat cable is a pig to put back into place, which nobody ever talks about.
Replacing the flat cable is the right thing to do, as the pins (detached from the ribbon) can cause this problem. They do not detach without mounting them incorrectly btw. Take your time. The same for the flat cable attached to head. This can’t be replaced so take your time. A great tip from Alex Cornelissen is to mount the read-write board first and move the tray enough out of the way, so you can drop in the flat cable, attached to the head, from the top.
If all this does not resolve the errors, clean the head again. If it persists, the head could be the biggest problem.
About those flat AWM cables, both sides lost the blue sticker after the first pull out, although I was extremely careful! Probably a defective ribbon? Contacts were consequently loose too, because they were free from any adhesive.
Pushing the head flat cable from the top once the board was in place crossed my mind too.
Also… Does the F error position (last one in my case) correspond to the MRH number on the schematics? In 7, pin 20 of the TDA 1327? Just to check that the track isn’t broken.
