I got this Samlex SEC-1223 from a fellow ham in town – he said the unit would not power on and I could have it if I wanted it, as he figured I could fix it up.

The unit appears to have suffered from a short on the DC side either due to an accident, or the output diode. Basically, capacitors C21-C23 burst, MOSFETs Q1 and Q1 shorted, transistors Q3 and Q4, the 6.8A AC fuse from the mains, and in some cases (though not mine) IC1 gives up the ghost too. So common, in fact, that eBay had several offers for parts kits to repair these of which I bought one of them and replaced the faulty parts.

I went and verified the power output (and tweaked it) to 13.8VDC and ran it through a few cycles with the Kenwood TS-850S on FT8 while monitoring the outputs and there were no unexpected variations – only normal curves you’d see with normal usage.

This power supply belonged to WA0X (SK), father of NJ0N. I never met Gerry directly that I can remember, but I do remember either him or John calling each other in our local Wires-X node almost daily, but at least once a week and have conversations for as long as they could. I later learned that Gerry was in a nursing home in town and he had a setup in his room to be able to hit the local Wires-X node.