Repairs for RCA UTVs - Page 2

hi,

i have rca utv. before i have picture in picture, now it just showing search for satellite in pip. Do i need to subscribe msn to get pip? Thanks

No PIP is built in, as long as you have connections to both tuner inputs. Check your signal strengths on both tuners, if one of them reads zero, try swaping cables. If the same one still reads zero, then you may have tuner going bad. If you swap cables and get a signal, then you may have a cable or LNB issue.

Let us know how it goes.

it looks like the turner going bad. do i need to sent out for repair or can i fixed myself? I bought the unit for $50 three years ago. Is it worth it to sent it out. Thanks

No, I would not try fixing it yourself. My friend and I tried to solder a new chip in to mine and we had a hell of a time. So I ended up shipping it out to be fixed to CCS Corporation I highly recomend them, and for me it was worth the $199 to get both tuners fixed and a new 120 gig HD.

Hi guys... first time poster but i have been reading here for some time

I just wanted to express my thanks to those that mentioned CCSCorp for a good reliable place to repair your UTV units. I unfortunately had two utvs that were both having issues, either tuners or hard drives and or both.

Being sceptical since i live in Canada i sent them off anyways on a monday... CCS received them on Wednesday and on Friday they were being tested for the weekend to see if they were 100% fixed

I provided a us mailing addy for the return of these units and as promised Monday morn they were shipped out and i received them Wednesday around Noon

The costs were 130$us each and for that they also include return shipping

I could not be more pleased with the job they did , and with the fact that if it were not for this site (and just for the record i have my own satellite site) i may have ended up having to scrap them utvs and upgrade to Tivo. So with that in mind i say thanks to all that contributed to this thread and to those that recommended CCS Corp.

Thanks again for the help this site has given me

I sent my RCA ULT which had a failed tuner, customer service at CCS Corp. was friendly and fast. I just needed the name of someone reliable to send my unit to, and AVS forum came through. I decided it was better to spend $266, and have a working unit with more room on it than wait for someone to re-invent the ULT. Nick Zimmerman did a great job.

Btw, what was the fee for fix the tuner?

Posting to save it from being archived.

I called in yesterday for a freezing problem again, and they "offered" to ship a new unit, no charge. I do have the protection plan. It should arrive in three business days and the old unit does not need to be shipped back. I'll let you know how things go.

A new UTV unit or one of the new R10 or R15 units?

Last year a had UTV replaced with PP, they sent refurbished HDVR2 Dtivo, they didn't want the UTV back. But two months later I was hit with $262 fee for non returned equipment. They sent air-bill, which triggered a second $262 charge.

I am so upset! The original service person guaranteed they would send a duplicate RCA UTV. Well it arrived yesterday and it is a Directv DVR R10!! I called and got no where. According to the notes, my unit was being replaced with a DTV unit, period. I activated the R10, but intend to pursue this on Tuesday. Will let you know.

Got a question about a "lock up"
Return from CES and plugged in and turned on the equipment.
A message was on my tv screen that the "Ultimate Recorder" had
to be update so I ok it and it went to "Web TV" and started down
loading the update. There were 297 parts that took 110 minutes
to complete and I was in the 5th part and the system locked up.
So I called Direct TV and they ran me through the paces of disconnection
and removal of card and finally said they couldn't help me and it was a
hardware problem. They transfered my call the Microsoft and we went
through the same procedures. They said it was Direct TV's Problem.

Now maybe someone can answer this problem.
If not I plan on sueing Microsoft for $850. in local small claims court for
requiring an update that was not needed and I didn't want. Hopefully
they will replace my unit and frankly that is all that I want. I love the
RCA ultimate unit and can not understand why it is locked up.
Anyone know why?
Hummer

probably a hardrive failure
normal updates to the UTV come in via sat

wonder if I could sue Microsoft everytime one of my harddrives died ?

You returned from CES (Consumer Electronic Show) or it was returned from CES Corporation after being fixed and it didn't work? If its the latter, then you should call CES and tell them that the unit you sent them to fix no longer works and send it back to them for repair. All units that come back from CES Corp should work out of the box with no problems. They test all units to make sure they work properly before returning them.

Received a call from DTV in response to my email concerning my "lack of" a UTV replacement. They did apologize and pointed out that my new R10 had a 70 hour recording capacity. I was not aware of this, and it took the sting off. Since I did not have to return my original UTV, I might at some point have it repaired.

Well for the rest of the story. Set up a couple of long , long nights with the little thing and nursed it through the 297 part download. It has a 56K modem in it and while the window during download says it will be 110 minutes, that's akin to a Direct TV rep saying I'll be back with you in a minute. Anyway I realized that the download through Web TV was a complete new operating system overwriting what was on the hard drive. Upon completion I reset up the Ultimate TV system and I am proud to relate today it is working as well as it ever did.
The thing that really irritated me is that Microsoft Techinical Support and Direct TV technical support had to know exactly what the problem was as I was begging them for answers and they chose not tell me.
Upon review of this forum in some depth the answer becomes obvious.
Thanks for your comments.
Hummer

just a quick note. I have two problem Ultv receivers which I have to get repaired but never ever was able to talk to anyone at RCA repair about the problem. always on hold.
Thanks to this AVS forum, and you folks who have submitted your solutions you had for your problem receivers, I will now send my units away to CCS Corporation. I still have another working ULTV unit to keep me going in the meantime. Gotta love this forum.
One of my units is stuck in the "dialing WEBTV mode". Is there a working repair code that I can input to the receiver via the remote without shipping the unit? thanks a bunch.

YES!! CCS Corporation is the way to go. They know their stuff. They have excellent customer service, in fact one of the techs called me to verify things. I sent my unit there about 2 years ago to replace both tuner chips and upgrade the hard drive to a 120 gig. I have not had one problem since. I still use an Antec laptop computer cooler to keep my unit cool.

Sorry, don't know about the reset for the webtv mode.

I had a tuner fail about 5weeks ago.
I got online and discovered the max2104 failure mode and deivce recall.
I ordered 2 parts from Dallas/Maxim ($5 each/$10 shipping = $20 total)
The parts arrived in about 2 weeks from thier Phillipine factory( in sealed hermetic/humidity pak)

I had hoped to get access to a real hot air station at work, but no deal, just a
regular soldering station with really good magnification...

here is my experience:

successfully did the rework this weekend in the local lab, not for the faint of heart...
(sorry pics are so bad, thier off my cell phone w/ fixed focus)

however, I wasn't successful with solder paste... I'd like to know how to do it better next time so please review my process and point out errors... it was pretty crude so don't laugh... (I did no preheating... me bad)

I left the board in the chassis as adjacent connectors were well mounted on back panel.([IMG]image_008.jpg[/IMG])

The 7mm TQFP (image 023, thats a AA battery in pic next to the spare part) was in an RF Can that took up about 2 sq inches, the lid of the can was a press fit and poped right off.

1) draped board in tin foil as crude heat protection and poked a hole over the part, hole was size of a $0.25 coin.
2) fasioned a funnel from tin foil on my hardware store heat gun, down to about 3/8" outlet.
3) applied heat and flipped bad part with tip of xacto knife (almost dislodged a small passive as part landed back on the board...(did this part at home in the kitchen)

4) I wicked all solder off and cleaned w/ flux and flux remover.... nice shinny site

here's where it got hard...

5) applied a line of solder paste across pads (which looked way too fat, used smallest dispensing tip I could find)
6) applied smallest drop of flux
7) applied heat expecting solder to puddle onto pads

Solder paste just dispersed/mixed into the flux and resulted in grey goo I had to clean/wipe off.

should I have not applied flux?
applied too much heat? (heat gun, flux boiled... hmmm)
(I think I sould have not have removed the old solder and should have just reflowed it with flux and heat gun)


8) recleaned
9) placed part (hard, even under magnification, every nudge was a big displacement.) and applied a drop of flux
10) tacked down one corner with a pencil (used smallest metcal pointed tip I could find)
11) tacked down opposite corner
12) used pencil to solder legs (very ugly, applied flux as needed, appeared as many globby bridges)
13) cleaned, and wicked excess solder (under low mag view, some pads looked pretty empty of solder)
14) cleaned, fluxed and reflowed with heat gun. (results were better under high mag view)
15) scraped off the single goober remaining on one leg w/ xacto knife

checked mechancial connection and continuity on every leg to pad., "A OK", took home and it worked.
(image 007 is after rework)

working under magnification was hard, depth of field was poor and tools looked huge(xacto was like a butter knife!).
RF Can and the bench mounted magnifier interfered with getting the solder pencil onto the part (small range of angle)

took an hour start to finish. used 2~3" of wick, ~1" of thin solder wire, a dozen drops of flux, 4 swabs, maybe 6~10 seconds of spray can flux cleaner...

one side ended up mis-registered (legs were maybe 25%~30% off pads) in the end but I didn't want to try and correct it
as that would be pushing my luck.

btw, even a small drop of flux spread all over under heat (area of 6 or 7 sq inches) and I'm sure lots of surrounding passives reflowed a few times.

Some few joints didn't have the uniform shine as most and some adjacent passives lost the shine.
I'm assuming these could be cold joints or just have some residual crusty flux.
(I didn't "scrub" with flux cleaner just sprayed and let it run off)

the receiver is on 24/7/365 except for unscheduled down time so there is no on/off temperature cycles.
If the rework lasts 6mo I think that will be OK until receiver gets replaced...

hope this is helpfull to others...

darrell

I did the disk upgrade about 1+ year ago and also had to babysit the dial-up SW upgrade. (I went with a WD disk)

I recall maybe 4 or 6 hours total, it would get 90% through then drop the line.
This repeated half a dozen times or so.

I always thought that if I could force 19.2K it would have completed faster.

ours reports about 105hrs of time...

My wife could use a three tuner model! :-)
During the ~month our tuner1 was dead she mastered the process of "********** file->VCD" while I fumbled with VCR timer programming[dark ages]... Doh!

I was glad to avoid moving to an R15 as I'm holding out for better HDTV PVR solution. (I think DISH is one-up on DTV on HD w/ PVR and mpeg4)

here is a pic or two of hardware store heat gun I used (1200W milwalkee sp?) and the bad chip. (Gun is just a unregulated two setting (hot/cool) device, I was wondering if a hair dryer gets hot enough, haven't measured one)

I've had experience recovering parts from boards with heat guns and doing wire mods. I've only toured board manufacturing lines and hot air stations....

I've used old school tools mostly (manual solder sucker syringe, wick, flux, solder pencils).

it was very gratifying to do a successful rework of such a small pitch.
I'd recomend practice with similar SMT devices on a dead board..

(Of course my family was amazed!)

darrellm, I applaud you in sucessfully changing out one of those chips. Good job!

However, I don't recommend anyone trying this it at home. My friend and I tried to fix mine, but after messing with it for 2 days I finally said the heck with it and sent off to have it done at CCS Corp. You definitely need special tools.

darrellm, I applaud you.
When my tuner went out I looked in and said NO WAY, and off to CCS it went.
I think the best thing you can do to increase the life of the UTV is to keep it cool. The faster hard drives and the places we have to put the box that do not have good air flow don't help at all. I found this USB manual speed controlled fan and laid it on top, exhausting from the top left air slots. I put a little tape over the side air slots to pull in air from the other openings. It is very quiet at the low speeds.

Thermaltake Mobilefan II - It may be harder to find now. They have come out with a new model, the II+ that has LED lights on it.

Just a note of thanks to CCS - after almost of year of struggling with my RCA UltimateTV with a bad tuner, I finally sent it off for repair, and they did a great job! It is great to have it back and be able to record with wondering if it would work or not! Thanks CCS!

My Sony UTV is acting flakey again.

I'm considering sending into Sony for repair again. I do recommend CCS which did the repair last time... but according to the below Sony site... The cost for repair by Sony is cheaper.

Anyone with recent info. on having Sony Repair their UTVs?

I'm thinking I might not get the same level of service with Sony vs CCS. One vs Two Tuner Repairs... Warranty... Fast Turn around... Not screwing up my Hard Drive/My Shows etc...

http://eservice.sony.com/webrma/web/index.do

I also have the DTV Protection Plan which would allow me to replace my Sony with a DTV DVR... Not something I want to do... but a cheap/fast turn around. Did that about 3 years ago with an RCA UTV that went bad. Didn't like the Tivo they sent... but it serves it's function alright.

It's probably going to the basement tonight and see if a cooler environment is all it needs for the Tuner to act normal. It isn't failing yet... but the picture freeze/audio drop out is annoying...

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