faulty Tele Vue Starbeam - troubleshooting

[davidrandell]

Hi everybody,

I have a TV Starbeam red dot finder. This has been fine for years. Today though I noted the red LED is not working. I first thought I had inadvertently left the unit on and the batteries had drained. But the batteries are fine, tested with a multimeter. I just wonder if anyone has hit a similar problem with a Starbeam or other RDFs and how to troubleshoot the problem? It looks to me a small grub-screw is used to lock the Starbeam's  chrome illuminator to the rest of the unit so I guess this needs to be loosend first to remove this. But my question is how can I tell if the if LED is dead or where else the problem lies? How easy is it to source and replace these LEDs?  Or will I need to get a new illuminator unit? 

Many thanks,
David Randell

[Floater]

Hi, David.

You might have this already but, if not, it may help:

http://www.televue.com/pdf/literature/Starbeam advanced telescope pointer.pdf

I'm afraid I cant help any more than that - except to say that when mine appeared to have started not working properly (after some time), it was just a case of screwing in/seating properly the illuminator unit. It can come loose when switching on or off the LED.

 

Hope you get sorted.

[davidrandell]

44 minutes ago, Floater said:

Hi, David.

You might have this already but, if not, it may help:

http://www.televue.com/pdf/literature/Starbeam advanced telescope pointer.pdf

I'm afraid I cant help any more than that - except to say that when mine appeared to have started not working properly (after some time), it was just a case of screwing in/seating properly the illuminator unit. It can come loose when switching on or off the LED.

 

Hope you get sorted.

Thanks for the reply and link to the PDF. I had missed that a brass stud connector seated inside the illuminator unit looked a little corroded. Cleaned it and its fine! So it was nothing more than that.

Regards
David