Only if you profit beyond the total cost of loan.

For me, I wouldn't buy it.  I have a hard time buying anything from China.  Sometimes you can't avoid it, but if I had the means, I would buy something else.

IC-735 Main board:

I found a broken "jumper". In the service manual it is called W27

What is mysterious to me is - the "jumper" (there are lots of these on the boards) is an all- white device about the size of a 1/4 watt resisitor? I measured several of these and they are indeed "jumpers" with zero resistance in both directions (not a diode, etc).

My question is - why would Icom use these white (resistor looking) devices instead of a piece of wire?

Appreciate any comment...

And here's a very important reason.  Before that, just because someone has operated for some number of decades and never had a lightning problem means absolutely nothing.  I operated for 40 years and pretty much disregarded grounding issues and then one day, a tree in my backyard was struck.  Damage to the station gear 150 feet away was $3,500.  Three years later, the same tree was struck again and this time the damage was about $200, and I attribute the difference to the attention I paid to grounding after the first strike. 

Lightning doesn't have to strike your antennas or your house to do extensive damage to your equipment.  I think of a lightning bolt being similar to a freight train - there's little you can hope to do to change its direction and to be sure if a bolt hits your station directly, it's all over.  But, tremendous damage can be done by a nearby strike that doesn't hit your antennas at all.  When a bolt hits a tree, your tower, etc., extremely high currents flow through the earth in all directions and will induce voltages in any metal in the path of the currents.  That might be a water pipe, underground telephone line, underground cable TV coax, etc.  In the case of my second strike, a significant voltage was induced in the underground telephone line and the wires were blown off the telco termination on the outside of the house.  The damage to the station that time was limited to things that were connected to the phone line.  Everything was connected to a ground buss on the rear of the operating table, but there was no protection installed on the phone line inside the station.  The telco box was properly grounded to the electrical panel ground.  The purpose of the ground buss is to equalize the voltages that appear on the cabinets of the gear.  If it weren't there, various pieces of gear might be at different potentials depending upon how they're connected to conductors coming in from outside.  That potential difference (many thousands of volts) will be resolved by an arc and a high current flow (enough to blow the traces off of a circuit board).  It's interesting to think that the ground on electrical outlets and a single point ground outside will result in no potential inside at the equipment, but that's not the case.

If you're single point ground is 50 feet away from the station equipment, you may still see a significant voltage at the  equipment depending on how your cables are routed.  For example, in this part of the world, almost all houses have a dirt crawlspace and cables are often left lying on the ground there.  A good opportunity to have a voltage induced in the cables with a high current and steep wavefront traveling through the soil. 

Unless your single point ground is right there at the electrical panel (and I'll bet most aren't), then you WILL have a potential difference between the ground on your antenna or control cables and the electrical outlet ground.  Of course, you might be one of the lucky ones who never has a strike nearby (and I hope you are).  I was successful in ignoring the problem for 40 years, but I wouldn't risk doing that again. 

EM:  It has been my observation that on occasion an overheated conductor takes on a crystallized appearance and becomes brittle.

  Natural vibration caused by anything from machinery running or the house expanding and contracting to the wire vibrating in the walls can cause this fragile looking wire end to simply break.

If I were to bother to remove them, they'd be replaced.

The pins in these Molex/Molex-style connectors are spec'd at a dozen or two mating cycles and barely more than half the current load of the radio (hence 2 pins for + and -).  If someone is going to bother to surgically remove, attempt to re-form then replace the pins, why not just replace the pins.  They're 12 cents apiece.


Mark K5LXP
Albuquerque, NM

A finishing nail and a tap with a hammer has those pins out in a jiffy.

Mark K5LXP
Albuquerque, NM

One other thing,  I have never come across a feeder cable (meter to breaker box) that has both a neutral AND a ground cable in it. 

They are both the same.

  Also, I've never seen a breaker box that has both the ground bus and the neutral bus NOT connected directly to the metal of the box. 

UK:  This is a situation that shouldn't be considered "resolved" as soon as the problem is found and "corrected."

Many times when a conductor has overheated it changes the molecular structure of the copper wire and quite possibly the receptacle contact that it was attached to.

While your "fix" was probably fine, I would have been more comfortable if the receptacle was replaced and the wire end was cut off and a new section of the wire was used for connecting to the new receptacle.

At the very least, I would have checked it periodically for several months.  Perhaps this might be considered paranoia but I HAVE seen what happens to hot wire.

Water pipes for safety grounds are no longer per NEC because of the widespread use of plastic pipe.  Even if all the pipe in your house is metal, you don't know what the utility used out to the street so your "pipe ground" could essentially be floating in the structure.

From an RF point of view you are merely effecting the above, turning your water pipes into a lossy antenna.

  Yes, sometimes this helps because it may solve a symptom but the better way to fix it is to solve the common mode issue.

Question, how could I measure that my main ground is a minimum of 25 Ohms?

They had better not be.  They have to be connected together in the breaker panel.  If they aren't, then that is most likely your problem--and if that is the case, I'd suggest getting an electrician to fix it, because your home electrical system isn't up to code.