I got an old wavetek 132 function generator off Ebay that I am attempting to repair for entertainment and troubleshooting practice. I got one that was advertised as "no power up", so I can't have fun with it until I fix it. I just wanted to bounce some basic questions off of the very nice folks here to get ideas about how to proceed with the troubleshoot.
The first thing I checked was the fuse: OK. then power rails: Not OK! This unit has a power supply on the main board that provides +/-22V, +/-15V, +/-6V to the device. The +15V rail was only 7V. The other rails were off as well but not as much. Below is a screenshot of the power supply portion of the schematic.
The next thing I did was to remove the other two boards. One was a digital board that is used to produce noise, the other was an amplifier board that drives the output of the device. What remained was the mainboard and power supply. I checked the voltage rails again, and they were still the same (only 7V on 15V rail). Whatever problems there are, I think it is safe to say that at least ONE of them is on the mainboard and it is bringing down the rail.
At this point, I noticed that there were wire jumps on the mainboard that connect the +/-15 V rails of the power supply to the rest of the board (see TP2/TP3 in schematic). I cut these and measured the voltage rails again. This time the +/-22V and +/-15V rails were perfect (after minor adjustment of R105). I could not check the +/-6V rails because they're generated after the jumper.
So here's my questions:
- Do I need to provide a load to this power supply to really ensure that it is functional? The power supply I think is not a switch mode. There are a couple of opamps (IC6,IC7) that appear to control power transistors (Q17,Q24). Is there a name for this particular type of power supply? Unloaded, the power supply is producing the correct voltage. Is that "good enough" to proceed with troubleshooting beyond the power supply?
- I can foresee needing to isolate the different functional circuit "blocks". This means I need to cut power rail traces and restore them as each area is fixed/cleared. My concern is that if I just cut power rail traces on the PCB, I will be delivering signal from powered portions of the board into unpowered portions. Does this mean I need to cut signal traces AS WELL AS power rail traces? That will make it all more time consuming. The signal chain is really simple: an integrator that is fed into a comparator which feeds back to the integrator, toggling polarity to generate a triangle wave. The triangle wave is then fed to a diode shaper circuit that fakes a sine wave, after that there's an amplifier.
I should add that there are some electrolytic caps in the device. I am going to replace them, but I wanted to proceed as far as I did now because the power supply caps seem to be OK. Somebody replaced these in 1995 and wrote it on the PCB! I also notice that a few matched diodes (in a can "CA3039") where replaced with individual diodes. So someone has been "in there", but that is further downstream.
Many thanks for any advice you may have !