Time Ranger mods

[Ed in SoDak]

My wife, Sandy and I own a couple earlier Time Rangers. We discovered that there is a small but constant drain on the batteries, due to the "soft" power switch. A tiny portion of the circuitry is always on, waiting for you to press the power button. In about a month's time, it would be enough to run the batteries down. As a result, we always unclip at least one side of the both battery clips after each hunt. Besides the wear and tear, it's a bother fumbling around with them.

So I finally opened my unit up and added a separate power switch. I used a DPST switch to keep each battery electrically separated. While I was at it, I also put a volume control in-line with the speaker leads. It doesn't affect headphone volume, but it would be easy to wire it that way instead. We don't hunt with headphones, so I left that as-is.

I shoulda done this ages ago!

-Ed

 

[BuckeyeBrad]

about a year and a half ago I was pretty well caught up on learning my current detectors at the time and I wanted to pull the trigger on a TR (since I was totally "ignant" of the TR's andd LR's) that I couldn't see straight. But because I really can't see small near stuff well any more and knew I'd have problems seeing the TR display, I stopped myself. (this was no easy feat, believe me!) So I've always been curious about it. What can you tell me about it's performance? I see Dave and some others refering to running changes. What do you know about those? Have they changed over to SMT since yours was made?