I bought this model off ebay several years ago. When I originally got it the reception was poor and the thing would only work for a while and freeze so I put it away but got it out again and had another look at it. I measured the P/S voltages, looked at signals with a scope, checked temperatures and took the PC boards out and looked them over.
The first thing I found was that it overheats. The processor chip got quite hot so I glued an aluminum heatsink on it with epoxy. Everything else got pretty hot too so I cut a hole in the middle of the top cover and installed a fan. There is room for up to a 60mm fan to fit inside if it doesn't have the PC card slots in the way and there is a handy 12 volt DC jack on the rear for power. You just have to remember to turn on the 12 volts for each satellite.
There was noise on some of the voltage distribution lines so I installed a missing 220 MFD filter capacitor at CF113. There are several caps missing but it only needed CF113.
One of the biggest problems besides overheating is the lack of a chassis ground. I think that anything with a database in volatile memory should have a good ground to provide protection against static discharges so I cut off the 2 wire power cord and spliced on a 3 wire
grounding cord and connected the green ground wire to the chassis.
I also installed a toggle switch on the back under the hole where the cord comes in that is in series with one of the leads to make it possible to turn off the power. That's also handy to reset it when it freezes but that hasn't happened since putting in the fan and the 3 wire power cord.
Samsung can never seem to make anything that doesn't overheat and it's ironic that when the unit is turned off with the remote or the front panel button it can still sit there and overheat unless the rear mounted toggle switch is turned off because the fan shuts off but the power is still on.
The RF
modulator had never worked and while I had the main board out I noticed that it had some broken connections. It is only held on by some solder bridges between the small board on the end of the modulator and pads on the main board that break easily. I just removed the modulator since I don't use it and it's absence will provide more room for cooling air to flow.
Since I did all that the unit has been working fine and I haven't had any trouble with it except that it won't tune in the
PBS channels on AMC3 and won't allow editing the settings for a channel in case the audio PID needs to be changed or something like that.
I suspect those are software problems that could be fixed with a firmware
update but Samsung dropped the ball and doesn't have any updates available.
Linear Mode
