Icom 746Pro Fixed

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I made a post a week or so ago about my Icom 746Pro not transmitting.  I stated at the time that I didn’t have time to work on it, so I was going to send it off to get fixed.

Well I looked around and found some reviews for Mike Nadeau – N1EQ.  They were all good so I contacted him about working on the rig.

 

Icom 746Pro

I have to say, from start to finish, Mike has one of the most professional service organizations I have worked with.  Being in the computer business, we have to send things off for repair all the time.  I would love to find a company as organized and responsive as Mike.

 

You have to request a time to send the unit in, so I did that and when the time was appropriate, we double boxed it and shipped it to Mike Fedex Ground.  I wish I knew why it takes so long to ship from the middle of the country to the East cost, but it took 6 days. to get to Mike.

He got it on Wednesday Afternoon and by Thursday morning at 8:47am my time, he had it fixed.  Here is what he found:

 

“As expected, your rig has the re-designed PA board with MOSFET finals. And it also has the latest factory upgrades to the RF and CTRL boards.

So far, it has been my experience that these late-production units are much more reliable (IC151 failures are rare). But for whatever reason (I assume a factory error), some of them had a 4.7-ohm resistor, instead of a 10-ohm resistor, in place of R3 on the PA board. And this causes the pre-driver FET (Q1) to overheat and eventually fail.

Anyway, this was the problem with your rig. So I replaced the pre-driver FET (Q1). And I replaced R3 with 10-ohm.”
He then added a clip heat sink since I do mostly Digital Modes.  He shipped it Friday and by the middle of this coming week, I hope to be back on the air with it.
So I would rate the experience with Mike a 5 star.  Just be sure to recognize that he only accepts online payments such as Paypal.

 

 

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