Basic Skills: Half Split Troubleshooting
Maybe my excuse should be that it was somewhere around two in the morning. Or maybe it was just unclear thinking, and that was that. Sgt P. and I were called out to fix the AN/FPS-77 RADAR system just at the end of our day so we’d been fighting this problem for some seven or eight hours already. For some reason, a particular fuse down in the high voltage power supply kept blowing. Given this is the circuit that fed the magnetron with 250,000 volts at around 10 amps, it made for some interesting discussion with the folks in base weather, who were thus dependent on surrounding weather RADAR systems to continue flight operations.
If this sounds familiar, I’ve told this story before in a different context, but bear with me…
So how did we miss the problem that actually caused the blown fuse, and hence the loss of our site’s weather RADAR system for more than a day? The reason is that it was, in fact, two in the morning, and we’d run out of ideas. If you want a sense of the complexity of the system we were working on, here is the troubleshooting guide, and here is Continue reading