[Coco] Coco 1/2 RF faint?

[gene heskett]

On Monday, February 13, 2012 09:55:24 PM Jeremy Michea did opine:

> So nobody knows what I’m talking about or is it just a stupid
> question. Its ok, I can take it

I don't know as its that Jeremy, as much as its the Microsoft Windows Live 
Mail 15.4.3538.513 you are using screwing things up by using M$ only fonts 
the rest of the world, who pays attention to standards, doesn't fully 
understand, so the meaning of your message becomes a bit obfuscated.  See 
for instance what I assume is supposed to be "I'm" in the echo above.  That 
is what I see scattered throughout your messages when a punctuation 
character is meant, but which one?

As for your problem, I have never seen it, but since I am a CET, my best 
guess would be a dried out capacitor in your coco's video circuitry, 
causing the modulation to be much less than the 90% or so it was designed 
for, which in turn gives a very low contrast, and likely hard to sync to, 
image on a tv.  That may not be it, but the track record of low capacity, 
low voltage electrolytic capacitors commonly used in such places, its about 
20 to 25 years overdue.  That in itself says much good about the quality of 
the parts used to build the early coco's all those years ago.

If you have an oscilloscope, looking at the signals on each end of those 
capacitors, you should see an identical signal on both ends of the cap, 
only with a small offset in the DC voltage that signal is sitting on.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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