Hi,
I'm wondering if my HDR-FOX T2 has developed an issue with it's power supply, which seems to be a Humax PW808 Rev 1.0
It has a number of odd symptoms.
1. Sometimes it's just totally dead, but switching off at the back and back on brings it back to life. It's done this since I got it 2nd hand, at first it would only come on if nothing was plugged in at the back (no aerial or HDMI cable) but once powered on it was OK.
2. Sometimes it's stuck in standby just the red power circle lit up, clock display is blank/off. This is more often than not after a timer recording, and often that timer recording has failed.
3. Sometimes it just gets stuck in a boot loop (but this is rare). It always get to drive spin up and the Humax start up screen on the TV, but then makes a noise, probably from loss of power to the hard drive, and starts rebooting.
4. Sometimes plugging in an external drive to the rear USB will cause a shutdown/reboot, or part way through copying to the drive. I've got a 2nd machine that displays this issue but that's it's only issue. Maybe neither machine likes the extra power drain from the external 2.5inch HDD.
However the most common fault though is random picture break up which gradually gets worse over time, as if there was a bad signal, until it decides to reboot or just turn off, and if it's recording it'll come back with the message to say the recording failed due to a power failure. So it thinks the power has failed. The picture can also lock up completely with a frozen image but the sound continues, at that point none of the controls will respond and needs to be switched off at the back.
It's just so temperamental, I managed to record without any issues 3 hours of Forces TV yesterday (6x30min shows), but today I tried recording 3x30min shows and non of those 3 recordings got to the first ad break before the picture break up started followed eventually by the machine shutting down and rebooting.
As it's causing what looks like a bad signal, I'm wondering if one of more capacitors have failed on the power supply board causing bad voltage ripple on one or both of the DC power supply lines generating interference in the tuner or some of the signal processing. According to the board it generates 5.8V @ 3.0A and 12V @ 2.5A (short peak of 3.0A).
There is a company online selling a kit of capacitors for the PW808 board, which suggests it's a known fault. However in their list of caps one is listed at only 16v and the one in the actual Humax is 50v. That's the small 47μF cap on the primary side of the power supply so this pre-made kit may not be the best option if at least one is of a lower working voltage, I think it would be easier to buy the caps individually to make sure I get the correct values from somewhere like Farnell.
I've got an old YouView (DTR1000?) box that looks identical to the HDR-FOX T2 but on opening it up it has a different power supply with only 12V @ 4.0A and the connector is smaller. I was hoping to swap over the power supplies to try and narrow it down to this board before ordering parts.
Anyone had these symptoms on their Humax? Are the electrolytic capacitors on the PW808 board known to fail? Panasonic is famous for failing power supply caps in their DVD recorders, so could it be similar power supply caps in the Humax too? None of the caps seem to be bulging on top or leaking in any way.
Thanks,
JK.
