Late last night, my router went down. Checking it, I saw that the lights were all off. Huh. So, I unplugged and replugged it, and it came back up. Figuring it was a glitch, I went back to bed, and thought nothing of it. This morning, I found it was off again, and re-plugging it would do nothing. Crap.
So, I pulled it off the wall, and opened it up. Hey look, a bad capacitor. It’s labeled as a 680uF 16V cap, with a nice bulged top. After finding a replacement in my capacitor stash, I went about removing the old one… which was, a pain. Mainly because it’s on a huge ground plane, so heating the leads enough to get it removed was a challenge. Even my FR-300 desoldering gun took a bit of work to get things hot enough to melt. But, after about 5 minutes of working on it, I got the old one out, and the new one in. The new one is a bit taller, but it does fit ((And yes, I’m okay with a 16V capacitor in this case since the power supply is 12V (meaning a 75% derating) and the whole thing lives in my garage which is never above 20C. Yes, I know it’s above the minimum 70% derating, but not by much, and I didn’t have a 25V that would fit.)) ((Also note: Asus, at least on this board, paints their capacitor markings backward. Where normally the negative capacitor lead would go in the solid white marked hole, it is actually the positive as can be seen for all the other caps on the board. Why Asus does this, I have NO idea.)).
My dad handed me another item to repair this weekend, a Roland GP-100 Guitar Processor, circa mid-1990’s. He reported that it had been acting strangely, so he replaced the backup battery in the unit, but after that, it wouldn’t boot (screen would light, but then it wouldn’t show anything, or respond to controls). To me, symptoms like this always scream power supply problems, and given the age of the unit, to me that meant capacitors. So I agreed to repair it, and brought it home. After confirming the problem myself (you never know how someone’s AC power can influence issues like this), I started looking quickly for the service manual, which I found quickly at 
I recently picked up a Midland 75-785 handheld CB at Goodwill for $6, and thought I would see how it worked. I’ve thought several times about taking the HAM exam, and figured I might want to start out using a CB, repairing a CB, etc. I got the unit home, and fired it up, and it seemed to work okay with a simple 50R rubber duck antenna I got off my scanner. One thing that didn’t seem to work, however, was the battery charging circuit. I had some older Ni-Cad batteries to try in the unit, but they would quickly drain, and worse, the charging circuit didn’t seem to work (plugging it into my bench power supply, it would draw about 150mA at 13.8V, then quickly ramp down to 10mA, and sit there. Never really charging.