Satellite Radio Repair
So I decided to fix my Sirius satellite receiver today since it was acting flaky with its onboard controls and wouldn’t save any of my presets. Two buttons did not feel right and I thought maybe something had been spilled into it. So I started by spraying electronics cleaner into the case through vent holes. Which came out clean, but wasn’t getting into where I wanted it to. This particular radio is an XACT Visor model I picked up in the store one Christmas. It was used in my work truck at a previous job and now my wife is hooked on it. We get really bad radio stations where we live, so we don’t mind the subscription cost at all. So after the cleaning spray I took it apart with a T7 (I believe, maybe T6) torx driver on the bottom. These are handy sizes to have in your tool kit for working on portable electronics. Almost all the rest of it snaps together, save a few standard screws, and may require a little flexing of plastic to get to the screws that hold the front panel PCB on.
Once I had it apart I discovered that the menu and category surface mount buttons didn’t work. So being the stubborn person I am, I dismantled the buttons while they were on the board. Their internals use a spring disk not only for the contact, but to make the button rebound from depress. The disks on one side of the radio had failed to rebound, and were unrecoverable. So I surmised that it was making contact at the wrong times, thereby causing conflicts with me controlling the radio. So I just removed the button internals to prevent unwanted contacts from happening and put everything back together. Why you may ask? Easy, we have a remote for the radio, so we didn’t loose any real functionality, we in fact gained some back.
Button Internals
The wife is talking about a new one for herself, so I will fix it properly later. Will probably require me to order some buttons from an electronics supply house.
SIRIUS Sportster 5 Satellite Radio Receiver with Vehicle Kit
SIRIUS Stiletto 2 Portable Satellite Radio with MP3 Player
