TODAY DAMMIT

A system works intermittently. Marantz RC9200 and RF receiver control it. It had worked great on shelving, then when I was out sick another guy, not really an installer, moved it into the new cabinet. Today, one thing after another worked sometimes. Sometimes when the door was open, sometimes when we stood in front of it. Mercifully, the remote battery got low. I put it on the charger and went to troubleshoot the other system.

The other system has a DirecTV H20. It's positioned where a lot of sky light hits it. Three years ago I found with the original receiver there that just blocking that outdoor light solved any problems I had. The closet door has punched metal, about 50% open, so closing the door doesn't darken the area.

I tried everything with this one, including one layer of black tape under the emitter -- it never worked. Then one, two, three, four layers of blue tape. The IR still got through that tape ( ! ) but we still had to shield the whole thing from outdoor light...and if we shielded it with something that reflected IR back onto it, the sensor overloaded. Thank God I read at this site and I knew that could happen! So I'm going out there again with an IR Condom (the black cover) and a variable resistor, and I'm going to totally block the outside light, then find what value resistor will lower the IR to a working level, then I'll go buy that value resistor and put it in. What a pain.

So, back upstairs. After more tail-chasing, I went out and got my visible LED that I got from Xantech at CES. It shows no IR! Turns out that one LED cable was shorted. I looked at it carefully, and saw that it was a double emitter but one emitter had been neatly trimmed off. May I say EXCLAMATION POINT ! ! ! I looked at the other two, and one of them was trimmed the same way. So only one LED had been operating three components when the moon was in the right position and Klingons were flying around Uranus. I threw those LEDs. The guy who had ignorantly, I mean innocently, trimmed them off caught them before they hit the floor. Put in one dual emitter and we were done.

I prefer tracking down my own stupidity because I'm more limited than the rest of the universe in what they can come up with.

Do you ever feel on a service call like someone is filming you, or like you're back in school and this is a pop quiz? I was an excellent test-taker, but sometimes I just hold still and look around for the camera.