Elecraft T1 Tuner Repair

I've been kind of "radio inactive" whilst sorting out a few things over the last 3 years or so. First time operating in quite a while was back in October up in the Fish lake National forest with my sons. Just prior to leaving, I visited my buddy Chuck to run my gear through its paces. We hooked up my T1 QRP tuner (actually a max of 20 watts) to his FT-897 and my PRC74 military radio whip antenna. I keyed an AM carrier, pressed the tune switch and man--that old military whip tuned up in about 1.5 seconds. Well, that's what I thought... In actuality, I either hit it with too much RF (might have turned down the wrong power settings on the 897) or the tuner just hadn't been used in a long while... Regardless, I fried two diodes. They are barely visible on either side of the right-most torroid on the bottom of this photo. Small blue components aligned horizontally in this snap.

I looked all over and found replacement diodes at Mouser. Ironically, they are fifty cents each, and shipping is $6 (and it's no wonder--my two diodes were shipped in a mid-sized cardboard box!).

I've been stabbing away at desoldering these diodes, but no joy. I'm taking them to my buddy's. He's got a beautiful desoldering station (no joke--I seem to use it a lot). This repair should go quickly! Along wth testing my PFR, we're doing the repair in the next couple days. Hopefully my next post will be of a successful tuning sequence with my 817 and his Gap Titan antenna.

By the way: the trip to Fish Lake wasn't a total bust. That old whip is resonant on 10m (when switched to the antenna's 40m configuration), and 10m was wide open. At 5 watts with right around 1:1.5 antenna matching, I was using PSK to contact France and several US stations. It could have been worse!

73's de K7JTO