Here is a little more info thanks again N4UMJ for the info!
"-The ICOM W2A and the 2SRA are both fine radios when they
are working. They share many of the same circuitry and therefore
commonly fail with similar problems. When they die the most
common cause is the voltage regulator. I have seen many reports
of this and people generally get rid of them. I have heard ICOM
will go into the radio and modify it with upgraded components to
fix and prevent this in the future. Did you get ICOM to try this?
- The BC-72 charger is trouble from the start.
Not only does it put out RF hash all over the HF frequencies it is
known to fail and when it does it will most likely take your radio
out with it. Schematics are hard to come by on this unit and it
would be best not repairing this charger and going with a Maha
or better replacement.
- If there are users out there with BC-72 still working I
would advise them to charge the battery by itself and not leave
the transceiver attached to it. I am fairly certain this is what caused
the sudden failure of my W2A
- I am speaking from experience here because I had my W2A fail
and this was shortly after starting to use a new BC-72 charger I
acquired. I dove into the repair on the W2A and discovered that
radio is very difficult to work on. The regulator is a combination
surface mount and through the PC board mount for heat sink
purposes I suppose. Needless to say removal of the old regulator
was unsuccessful. I had another W2A that I had gotten cheap
along with another BC-72 charger. I was going to use them for
parts. Both the radio and the charger were beyond repair.
The parts charger had several fried components and smelled real
bad and the scrap W2A was completely dead. Two bad radios here
to make one good one did not work !
- My choice was to find a replacement W2A on e-bay that was
working. I could have taken the ICOM repair route with the other
two W2A's but decided that finding an ICOM W2A that was
already working would be a better choice. I still have the RFpower
module cards and can use them in the future if they fail. This is
the only thing I can say that is service friendly on these particular
ICOM radios.
- I just sold my older 2SRA on e-bay and it worked well for the
8 years that I owned it. The only problem I had with it was the
antenna jack worked loose from the PC board and I had to resolder
it.
-On repairing your broken function problem I would say that most
likely you have a bad flex cable. The W2A and the 2SRA are full of
them. I think the best way to deal with removal and replacement of
these would be a soldering iron with a long bar attachment so you
could desolder all the connections at once. I am sure ICOM has all
of these specialized tools and is why they can justify the high hourly
labor rate for repair. You also might be able to replace the bad ribbon
connection with a hard wire if this is indeed what is bad.
- I must say this was a learning experience and I still say the W2A and
the 2SRA are fine radios when they are working. They really had a lot
of features for radios of its time. Nice frequency coverage too. I had
many accessories for the W2A so it just made sense for me to find
another working unit.
I have the newer W32 without the function key and still find it
unnatural to use. I guess I got used to the function key being there
on the W2A.
- If you need a schematic and service manual for the 2SRA check the
following:
http://www.w7fg.com/ "