I noticed the remote head for my Codan 8528 HF xcvr getting, ... is hard to see at night, i thought maybe a globe blown, so opened it up and removed the pcb to see where the globes are for front panel key backligting. Well, surprise all the globes are working when plugged in on the bench. I thought, well, they going to fail one day and they work poorly as us, so let's see about making it better.
Made some measurements across globes solder pad, running about 4.3volts across globe, that's an odd number, did more checking to find they running three globes in series. Checking globes behind LCD display shows six globes. This means three sets of three globes, if one fails, you lose a good part of your backlighting.
Next what can we replace these with, I have some rolls of LED strings, I tried some blue, but poor backlighting of the keyboard, found white LED giving best keyboard backlighting., same for the LCD display, which yellow backing.
Next cut some strings of white LED ribbon and connect to the 12v and gnd points on the board. Removed old globes. Now Codan remote head much better at night. I will document on my web pages sometime.
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