It finally happened to me. About three years of use. I had glued down the cable at the TX adapter and the TX module with hot glue so mine would NEVER MOVE. I knew mine would never go bad and I never unpluged the cable from either unit and I have only removed the adapter 2-3 times from the transmitter. I was safe before it happened. Maybe! I have a stand on the back of my transmitter that seems to have helped cause the problem on my system.
I had taxied out and I flipped the stand down and the transmitter went dead, no control. I noticed the lights out on the TX module. After touching the adapter end of the cable in a couple minutes I could see that I had something wrong with that end. Slight touching would cause the Wea module to either light up or blink like it was just powering up. Believe it or not, I had times when my Wea would not light up and I turned it on and off and that fixed it... HA HA. That happened over the last year multiple times.
I've been an electronic tech for 55 years and have never had a connector like this fail. I was sure it was a broken wire in the patch cable itself, probably by the connector. On the bench I found that I could hold the plug in and wiggle the wire and nothing changed. I could pull it side to side, end to end and nothing changed but if I moved the plug itself, immediately the power would flash on and off. I'm guessing that the spring tension of the metal female connector IN the plug itself is loosing tension and any slight movement just aggravates this issue. Hence my stand touching the cable when I folded it was just enough. With all this being said, the one post that said he would never fly with the stock cable again, he is so very right. And, yes, it does have to happen to you to get you to realize it's going to happen to everyone. My resolution was to use 22 strand servo cable and hard wire both ends. Change the cable every year if that satisfies you but keep in mind, the new one is on the way to failure as well.
The adapter has both a pin connector and a board edge set of solder pads. I elected to use the board edge ones on the adapter side. On the TX side, I was a little skeptical of the board edge pads so I bent the plug male pins in opposite directions and soldered directly to them.
Here's some pictures of the process and the cause and hopefully the fix. Gosh it seems like we never talk about any failures of the Wea system except this. And I posted my "FIX" with the hot glue about two years ago... hmmm
Originally Posted by
fireblade5437
Jo
I had not had my set long when my lead failed suddenly noticed LEDs going on/off and the lead had not been badly treated!
1. Use a very sharp blade and and remove the very thin plastic that's over the connections
2. Use a soldering iron that has around 1-1.2mm tip the soldering iron bit needs to be well tinned and clean as you need very quick heat transfer to the joint and as the tip is very small the heat loss happens quickly. Heat up joint and use the smallest diameter 60/40 tin/lead you can find and feed into joint.
3. I used a small amount of Hysol to seal the joint.
4. When this is set you will find that the plug is very slightly tighter in the socket than before
I have used since soldering and had no problems including swapping the lead to a DV4 from DV3.
Personally I would not use this lead as it is without soldering as it is just an accident waiting to happen, the guy who stated that his lead was ok and thinks they are all fine to use just remember mine was fine one minute and useless the next! You have been warned :-)
Alan