I finally got my first 100% test pass rate on an avionics bench this morning

Been chasing a gremlin in an older Garmin GNS 430 for like 3 months, swapped every board twice before I found a cold solder joint on the backplane connector. Felt like winning the lottery watching all the self-tests go green in the shop at PDX this morning. Anybody else get weird fixes from bad solder instead of blown parts?

3 comments

3 Comments

shanelee26d ago

Add a dab of flux and reflow those backplane pins sight unseen.

michael_jenkins3927d ago

Feels like winning the lottery watching all the self-tests go green" - man, I gotta say I think you're overhyping this. Cold solder joints are like the most basic thing you check first, not something to chase for three months. I've seen guys swap boards twice and still miss it because they're too focused on the expensive parts instead of the 5 cent connection. If you really had a gremlin that bad, you should've just wrapped the whole harness and reflowed the pins before burning that much time. Half the time those old Garmins act up because of dirty contacts or cracked solder, not blown components anyway. So yeah, congrats on the fix but maybe save the victory lap for when you find something actually tricky.

the_sam27d ago

Heard the exact same thing from a buddy who works on old King radios. Spent a week tearing his hair out over an intermittent failure, finally found a hairline crack in a solder pad that you could only see under a magnifying glass.