The known problems were:
The little RCA plug jumper was missing so I made one.
An inadvertant jiggle of the SO-239 while connecting an antenna produced a brief burst of receive noise, so I suspected a bad connection at the SO-239.
Another major problem was that the unit was stuck in split mode and some of the controls on the right hand side of the control panel didn't work.
Overall, it seemed like it could be repaired.
I decided to order a CAT control cable for it and try to get it out of split mode.
The cat cable worked fine, but apparently split mode control via CAT is not supported for this radio so I had to try to fix the button.
Sanded and cleaned the surfaces then painted it with some Rustoleum Painter's Touch flat black.
Over time the SO-239 center conductor had become loose and started to move the wire up and down and finally broke the copper trace and solder right off.
I had to remove the filter board to make a repair and ended up soldering a header pin in this hole.
I then added a wire from the pin to the SO-239 in a C shape to allow it to flex and not place downward force on the pin.
Not a perfect repair, but at this point I wasn't even sure if it would put out power -- so it was good enough to continue.
It was evident that previous repairs on this radio had been done in a crude manner, including replacement of the finals.
I reassembled the unit and now signals were coming in fine through the SO-239 antenna connector.
It seemed to transmit ok, but it was still stuck in split mode.
As you can see from the picture, there was an attempted repair made involving thick wire and a lot of glue.
I carefully removed all the glue with an xacto knife and clipped away the heavy wires.
I also removed the front panel to get a better idea of how a better repair could be made.
It appeared the split button had been pushed hard enough to snap off the corner of the PCB. It was probably hit by something.
The board fragment and its traces could not be reattached.
The split button was smashed closed and this was causing the other controls sharing the v+ line to not work: the VFO A/B and MEM buttons among others.
I turned on the radio and shorted the split mode control line with a pair of fine point tweezers and it switched out of split mode.
I tossed the pcb fragment in the trash.
Fine wires were run to make the missing connections from the PCB fragment according to the schematic and pcb illustration in the service manual.
Also, the RIT LED had broken its pad so I ran a wire there as well.
I ordered some small panel mount buttons that I will try to mount on the chassis to restore the split function.
This is going to be a mobile ragchew radio and split is not something I use much anyway -- so this is low priority for me and I will work on it down the road.
I was pleasantly surprised to get 100W into the dummy load on CW. Audio is ok on sideband and FM, but a little distorted on AM.
The built-in speaker sounds ok but a bit raspy at times. Tthe radio sounds ok with an external speaker.
Received a good on-air signal report.
Installed and working ok in the 1983 Sentra.
PA fan was very noisy. I tried to oil the bearings and it stopped working altogether.
I have been using it at about half power on SSB anyway without the fan.
