Last night I plugged in my HT to charge, and when the battery was full, I unplugged the charging cable and tried to power on the radio. It didn’t turn on.
At first, I thought it might have been from the heat, on the way home the radio was giving a temp reading of 112°F, I had left it in the car all day. When I plugged the radio back into the wall wart, it powered on without issue. After some troubleshooting, I found the problem.
This is what the power plug SHOULD look like:
Instead, it looked like this:
So I thought, “Where did the yellow tip go?” Not only did I find the tip, but the root cause of the power issue:
There it is, the yellow tip from the charger tip, sitting tightly in the bottom of my external DC charging plug. The tip is resting on the switch inside the plug that tells the radio to run off of external power, which is why the radio won’t power up on a fully charged battery.
So today I set out to try and remove the little piece of plastic. Having tried everything I could think of, I resorted to ordering a new plug from Hong Kong. I will have to do a teardown on the radio and solder in a new plug.
I will do a teardown post once the boat brings the connector to the states, it looks like a fairly easy process, so hopefully, I will be back on the air without cables soon.
73 DE KB3CDA
2021 UPDATE: I was contacted by Peter, KG6WOX with a great technique for getting the plastic tip out of the radio. See his Blogspot post for more details. Thanks, Peter!