Weird repair of the day: u-blox LEA-5S I2C interface

I have a DF9NP 10MHz GPSDO that is based on a u-blox LEA-5S GPS receiver. Essentially, the LEA-5S outputs an 800Hz signal that is used to discipline a 10MHz VCTCXO with a PLL. The LEA-5S doesn’t have persistent storage, so an I2C EEPROM is use to store the settings across reboots.

Lately it seemed that the reading of the settings from the EEPROM had failed. The u-blox was always booting with the default settings. This prevents the GPSDO from working, since the default for the timepulse signal is 1Hz instead of 800Hz. Here is the summary of my troubleshooting session and the weird repair that I did.

Adjusting TX gain in the FT-817ND

If you’ve been following my latests posts, you’ll know that during the last V-UHF contest I detected reduced output power on the 70cm band in my FT-817ND. The output power was only about 60% of the maximum 5W in SSB and CW, but in FM mode it reached 5W. This problem only happened on the 70cm band. On all the other bands, the radio reached 5W output power in every modes. After spending some time studying the service manual, I came to the conclusion that the problem was that TX gain in the UHF band was too low. This is a software calibration parameter, so, in the end, fixing this problem has been rather easy.

Replacing the fuse F1002 in the FT-817ND

On last Saturday’s V-UHF contest I observed reduced output power on the 70cm band in my FT-817ND. I spent the next day poking inside the radio with the oscilloscope trying to see where the problem was. While doing this, at some point I completely lost output power in all bands. I found that the problem was that F1002, an SMD fuse, had gone open. Here I describe said fuse and the replacement procedure, which I found much easier than I thought.