I have a DJ-580 I bought new along with an extra battery pack about 4
years ago. Recently one of the packs would not charge up to full
voltage. These are *sealed* (with super glue?) packs and Alinco expects
you to just buy a new one ($40+) when one fails. Ouch!
I found I could take a sharp knife (*I* used my pocket knife) and put
the cutting edge on one of the bottom *corners* of the pack,
centered on the center parting line running along the edges of the pack,
then strike the back side of the blade with an ordinary screwdriver
handle (lightly) a couple of times and the blade would break the glue(?)
seal on that corner. Then I moved to the other corner on the bottom and
did the same thing. This broke the seal cleanly all along the bottom and
part way up each side of the pack. Finally I carefully widened each
break towards the top, on both sides, by progressively moving the blade
towards the top of the pack and striking it with the handle of the
screwdriver. The two halves of the pack case seperated cleanly allowing
me to find the bad cell in the pack. I then used the old car battery
trick on the (single, in my case) bad cell to clean the "whiskers" out
of the cell.
In case you are not familiar with the "car battery" trick, here it is:
Temporarly attach alligator clip type jumper leads to the bad cell
*only* (*not* to the contact points that the talkie uses for power).
Connect the loose end of the jumper on the negative side of the battery
to the negative side of the car battery. Then *momentarily* strike the
positive jumper lead to the positive pole of the car battery (about a
"dits" worth at 20 wpm). This fixed my pack. The reason you do not want
to try this on the outside contacts of the pack is because there is
*probably* a circuit board in there with some diodes and a thermister to
allow the pack to be "rapid" charged. *Bad* things might happen if you
apply the car battery voltage to this curcuit!
... Don't bother pushing that key. There is no Esc.
--- PPoint 2.00
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