I've been lurking this forum for too long, but I've learned tons of stuff since I found the website!

I've been looking for broken electronics to beef up my component level troubleshooting skills.. unfortunately, it seems like most industries are moving away from it, and most of the info that I learned in college seems to need a bit of a refresher. I've been purchasing tools for a shop in my living room (Against my wife's approval!) and I just picked up a broken DC power supply off Ebay. I think it will be a good challenge to fix it, and maybe I'll put it to use if I get it working.

Unfortunately, I can't find ANY info on it! I've seen a few floating around, but when you search for the manufacturer, you just get a lot of pages from businesses that calibrate their products. It leads me to believe that maybe this is a government, or lab grade unit. I've seen a couple of pics online with the guts of similar products from this, and it looks really nice inside!

Vector-Vid is the manufacturer, but I wonder if that's just a name on another manufacturers product. Here's a link to the one I got...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vector-Vid-...076?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2ec393bda4

 

Hello there. i am new here but Google this name and go from there. Jestine yong. he and Kent lew are the goto guys for this kind of thing. they have several books that are information highways.

Good luck

K3CFC

 

If you cannot find schematics, take photos of the front and the PCB.
If this is a linear supply you should be able to fix it by poking around with a DVM.

 

I forgot that I posted this!

Well, just an update.. I received it and I'm totally satisfied with it! It didn't work just as I expected, but after some troubleshooting, I noticed that it had a burnt up run that lead to a completely shorted out bridge rectifier! Everything else SEEMS to test okay.. transformer, caps, and semiconductors. We'll see what happens when I get my parts in! It was a great device to get my hands dirty again.. it had 2 identical power supply boards for each output.. perfect for taking measurements! It does look like it has had a few repairs done before.. capacitors have been replaced, and another run was repaired.

Oh, and in case anyone else gets one of these and is stumped.. I did a little research after I opened it up. The part number printed on the power supply board lead me to a page with the same model with a different "manufacturer". This model is the same as a Lodestar 8202 or 8203. It looks like it retails for around 300-500 online, but this baby's going to stay on my work bench! (I ended up with the 0-30v 5a version!)