Subject: radio won't power on via battery - how I resolved it.
Newsgroups: gmane.recreation.radio.hardware.kenwood.th-f6a
Date: 2008-04-24 04:11:21 GMT (10 weeks, 6 days, 7 hours and 58 minutes ago)
If I read about this story in this group, I wouldn't have believed it. But it happened to me and I wanted to share. Has anyone else seen this? I have a 2-year old TH-F6A that sees very light use. It's extremely well cared-for, it spends most of its time plugged into its stock charger waiting for an emergency or the weekly net. The radio hasn't been modified in any way and I'm only using the stock Lithium battery and charger. Yesterday I unplugged it from the charger to use it on the weekly net and ... it didn't power on. If I plugged it back in to the charger, it would power up. Removing and reinstalling the battery didn't help. Switching batteries from my wife's F6A didn't help. My battery on her HT worked fine, so I confirmed it wasn't a battery problem. I tried doing a full reset on my HT and that didn't help either. I left the unit unplugged and uncharged all day. When I came home from work and tested it, the unit would still not power on when powered from battery. Using a DVM I verified that the battery was properly charged. I also tested the resistance across the HT's battery terminals on its back case: 230 KOhms. I compared this value to my wife's (working) HT: her's read 24 kOhms. I double-checked the results. I then installed the battery on my HT and .. it powered up! I then tested the resistance of the same terminals on my HT and they were 24 kOhms. What does this mean? I have no idea. At first I assumed that a fuse may have given out on my HT, but after seeing the difference in resistance values between a working and non-working unit, that's clearly not what happened. I've had this radio fail to powerup one other time in the past 2 years but I seem to recall that simply removing and reinserting the battery fixed it last time. So, if this happens to you, you might want to unplug your HT from everything and briefly test or short out the terminals on the back of the radio to drain it of some sort of residual charge. ------------------------------------