Amstrad DRX180 Sky+ Box

I was asked to look at an Amstrad DRX180 Sky+ PVR satellite box. The problems that the user reported was that the box was giving a "No signal" on tuner 2. This prevented him to record a different channel to the one being watched.

The box was out of warranty and sky in his opinion was charging a lot of money to send an engineer out to have a look at his box. Sky had quoted him for replacement reconditioned box.

I opened the case and immediately noticed a 470uf 16v capacitor quite local to the tuner with a bulging case. The capacitor was un-soldered and replaced with a 470uf 25v capacitor.

Replacement of this capacitor satisfactorily repaired the box. On researching these symptoms further on google it seemed that this type of problem of no signal on tuner 2 was quite common on this particular type of box. Sometimes this was repaired by replacing the hard disk drive. The hard disk on this box seemed ok as once the capacitor had been replaced the recording seemed to work.

The cost of the capacitor was a few pence.
--Another device repaired by replacement of a capacitor costing a few pence--
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