It's a cheap Free to air DTT decoder I bought 3 weeks ago: it was the cheapest decoder in the shop, has 2 Scart connectors with passthrough and low consumption (6 W operating, 4.8 during standby) so I can tolerate the sloppy soldering and the bad assembly (e.g. the Scart connectors are misplaced).
What I'm afraid of are heat and caps: the Cheertek CT216 processor heats a lot and there are few openings for cooling, maybe putting an old Pentium 1 heatsink is a Good Thing for long term stability. Caps are our old acquaintances: two CapXon KM 10 uF 400V as primaries, a single G-Luxon 470 uF 16V (can't read the series) and a bunch of poly-shaped lytics as secondaries.
Empty connectors near the fake polys are most likely the unpopulated headers for S/PDIF port and front panel commands (program up/down, volume, etc.); the one between the left Scart and the antenna connector is the usb header.
Details of caps:
I know best warranty is preemptive recapping of junk caps with something decent: if I understand correctly, the Capxon are two GP caps, not high ripple one though are advertised as good for psus, and can be replaced with better spec'ed Panasonic EDs or, as a minor alternative, Rubycon YXAs or NCC KMGs (22 uF to achieve a slightly higher ripple handling). However I can't recognize those fake polys so I'm unsure if they're good enough to be left or if they should replaced.
Zandrax
What I'm afraid of are heat and caps: the Cheertek CT216 processor heats a lot and there are few openings for cooling, maybe putting an old Pentium 1 heatsink is a Good Thing for long term stability. Caps are our old acquaintances: two CapXon KM 10 uF 400V as primaries, a single G-Luxon 470 uF 16V (can't read the series) and a bunch of poly-shaped lytics as secondaries.
Empty connectors near the fake polys are most likely the unpopulated headers for S/PDIF port and front panel commands (program up/down, volume, etc.); the one between the left Scart and the antenna connector is the usb header.
Details of caps:
I know best warranty is preemptive recapping of junk caps with something decent: if I understand correctly, the Capxon are two GP caps, not high ripple one though are advertised as good for psus, and can be replaced with better spec'ed Panasonic EDs or, as a minor alternative, Rubycon YXAs or NCC KMGs (22 uF to achieve a slightly higher ripple handling). However I can't recognize those fake polys so I'm unsure if they're good enough to be left or if they should replaced.
Zandrax
Attached Files