This originally happened somewhere around 2021 or so, and again just the other day!
Took my beloved new radio camping but when I got out there at night I went to turn on the AM broadcast band and it was nothing but loud static hiss.
If I recall correctly I had it on shortwave first and heard a loud bzzzzap bzzzap repeatedly which I attributed to an electric fence and I first blamed the failure on that being so close I figured it was a EMF zap that destroyed the MW transistor front end.
Well turns out I was wrong... I think..?
I found the first transistor of the MW internal ferrite bar antenna front end transistor had shorted completely so I set out to replace it not realizing at first the OEM part is no longer manufactured.
Only thing I had at the time was an improper transistor that sort of worked but figured it would get me by until I found a new replacement part that was the same original.
The rest is history.
It died again recently even frying the temporary replacement transistor. This time I narrowed it down to broadcasting on MW in the same building as the radio. Now it makes sense.
They never built the radio to handle strong RF fields near it so in the video I discuss how it failed, what parts can replace the original, and how I fixed it for good (God willing) this time and installed protection diodes so this sort of failure will not happen again...
For laughs this is how the upside down sideways replacement transistor looks because it's not a pin for pin drop-in replacement...
The triangle electrical tape is over a capacitor modification I made to protect it and not related to the failure. Diodes were soldered in at those points to clamp voltage above around .7vAC RF so that the gate of the FET will not endure this failure again.
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