Is there a way to tell for sure?
If I took a picture could you tell?
Some cable technician cut this off of my friends television (she said it
stopped working on New Year's - must have been some party), anyway, and the
cable tv tech said it was bad. I told her the cable technician is probably
smoking crack! The component (looks like a resistor to me) isn't bad from
the limited testing I did, but I need to order a new one for her.
I'm a computer guy just trying to help her out....not an electrical
engineer.
Zack
This is why it's always important to give all the details to begin with.
Your original post suggested the part was bad, which ruled out the obvious
means of verifying the color code. That would be you take an ohmmeter
and measure it, and that would give you the basis to interpret the
color code. This is also useful in recent years when sometimes the
colors used to code the resistors are odd looking, so at a glance it's
not clear what standard color a band is supposed to be.
But given the assumption it was bad, then there the measured resistance
wouldn't match the color code.
If the resistance matches the expected value of the color code, then you
know it's good.
If the value is zero, or close to it (which might be hard to judge
given the color code indicates a quite low value resistor) then it is
likely bad, because a bad capacitor could be shorted.
An open circuit (ie really high resistance) sure wouldn't be what
the color code suggests it would be as a resistor, but it might
be a capacitor, since capacitors will be open (though high value
capacitors will charge up, showing a low value resistance at first
and a high value resistance in the end). A capacitance meter,
or the function on a DMM, would give an indication of whether the
value matches some color code scheme for capacitors.
But, you have a bigger problem, something that would have been
bypassed in the first place if you'd revealed the whole story. Your
original post was so sparse that people took the question literally
when the answers should have dealt with the bigger problem.
YOu have some guy who may not have been qualified to look at the
tv set, and then turns around and drops the problem in your lap, and
you aren't qualified either. It doesn't even sound like you know
exactly what the "cable technician" was doing.
Given all that, it's no wonder you are going to have problems here.
Because you aren't actually evaluating the tv set, you are trying
to fix something some other guy has decided is the problem, and
only he knows why he thinks that.
Drop it back in his lap, because he's the one who's done the damage
so far.
Michael
