Feedback

May 1, 2001 12:00 PM

Some feedback about the column on Stabilant 22A:

Bruce Hislop, president of Perth Communications, Stratford, Ontario, writes: I have been using it (Stabilant 22A) for years, since the GE Phoenix days. Remember those miserable, noisy, molex connectors in those radios? Stabilant got those radios working reliably. Also fixed those GE MPI audio board connectors for good, too. And not to let Motorola off the hook, it settled down the unstable VCOs in the MCX100! I can't recommend it enough. I use it everywhere. Try it on shields, to reduce noise, and all those fussy little connectors out there. The price of the stuff might shock you, but you only need a drop, so the little bottle lasts a long time.

Another reader, Mike Moran, CET, writes: Just read your article in the February MRT and wanted to share my experiences. I've used Stabilant 22A and some other products for about 10 years and found them to be well worth the money. One example: Back in the early ’90s I was a public-safety tech. We had quite a number of Motorola KDT-480 mobile data terminals in our service base, and the most common problem was the unit refusing to boot when turned on, showing an “Error 08” on the screen. The logic units were trunk-mounted, and the universal fix was to remove them, disconnect and reseat all the connectors, and “crunch” all the socketed chips. Most of the time this worked, but on the ones that it didn't, we'd disconnect all the connectors and remove all the chips, then treat all the pins and sockets with Stabilant 22. I never saw this technique fail to bring a unit back to life, and the treated units generally never showed up again with that same problem. I've used Stabilant in a number of applications, along with the products of Caig Laboratories ( www.caig.com ) that offer a wider range of products. Based on my experiences, I can recommend both as useful shop tools, especially for those maddening come-and-go intermittents.