DL140 Quantel Ramcorder Repair Part 1

In this video i begin trying to diagnose and repair a friends Ramcorder.

At the moment i believe the faults to be related to a STV1601 and STV1602 ICs.

[rblakecoleman]

Absolutely fantastic. I have a VHS tape where they prepare a short trailer for The Living Daylights on a Harriet system, and also show how the intro for Bobby Davro’s 1991 era show was produced.

[BeauTardy]

Looking at that tearing video made me think of a sync issue immediately. You can also see the fields are blinking. I would look at hooking it up to a sync generator or genlock with black burst to lock it down. you can find them on ebay for cheap.

[SeanBZA]

I like that silicone tip. I just modified my ones using some vulcanised rubber tubing to do a similar job of making a flexible seal. the rubber tubing that they used to use for those Hellerman cable sleeves, applied with a 3 prong expander, is a pretty good rubber, and as it is vulcanised it lasts a long time even being hit with molten solder.

[pepepistola]

Merry Xmas! Please keep doing these Quantel PaintBox videos. The hardware behind them is truly fascinating and certainly of a high-end quality. I love the fact that they didnt cut corners when designing such beasts, unlike in this modern age. You should do a kind of hardware review of these 68k PaintBox systems with detailed specs on hardware and expansions, as there is no source of information whatsoever on them, besides your repair successes. All in all, thank you for your content!

[eliotmansfield]

I use a hot air gun to pre warm the pcb and all the copper - trick borrowed from welding big aluminium pieces that suck all the heat out of your torch.

[BeauTardy]

You might also want to check if his PB is set up for NTSC vs PAL.

[station]

Anything on those daughterboards that could cause glitches ? Like say the capacitors for the supply rails ?

[SeanBZA]

With the socket conversion how about for broken pins just use another row of those turned pin SIP units and solder to the existing pins, so you have a new row of fresh pins. Also do those chips run smoking hot, I suspect most of the issues come from them not being well cooled in use, and if there is enough room in the case by them to put in a small pin grid heatsink epoxied to the chips so they run cooler.

[thomasguilder]

Didn‘t you have an external parallel to SDI converter you could hook up to the parallel bus connectors? Looks like a address error when accessing the ram. Can you monitor parallel data input to the serializer? Good luck!

[tbbw]

Other then vintage nerdgasm does this kit actually have any use today or have they been replaced by some more modern gear... if so... what? :)

[pizzablender]

Lookls like addressing errors to me, with the image shifting a whole lot to the side.
Also, disconnecting the SDI input will let teh clock 'run loose' which may cause problems on really any marginal part in the system.

[OneBiOzZ]

im curious what it looks like on a scope and if there is sudden dips or peaks in the signal ... maybe some kinda crosstalk, glitches on the serializer output stage, or if its serializing perfectly but the data its getting is garbage

[DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

I hope that you haven't gone gone and broken your unit, you will have to reverse engineer the STV1601 and STV1602 ICs if not then you will have to find another serializer chip, I hope that you can find replacement chips for your recorder board and it is a shame that the chips are not made any more.