I love dealing with repair shops, and this is my first experience with Icom’s repair center in just about 15 years. After the last run in with them I decided I’d never purchase from them again so they really had nowhere to go but up.
After 15 years of pretty much ignoring any equipment they made, I was drawn back in via D-Star. Suffice it to say that over the last year I have obtained a lot of Icom equipment and since my 92 was nearing the end of it’s warranty period I decided to send it in for repair of an issue I first noticed last winter. From time to time the display does strange things. Most often it goes blank, and then it looks as if the radio was switched off when in fact it was still working fine. Sometimes it flips, sometimes it inverts, sometimes both. Often times it will “roll” and the bottom 5-10 pixels will be on the top of the display which then shifts down to make room. Strange stuff.
It turns out that a production run of 92′s had an RFI problem (for a transmitter, go figure) that all sorts of display glitches, mostly blank screens, were caused by. I was hoping mine would get worse over my year so it would be easier for them to duplicate the problem at the service center, but alas my time ran out and I sent it in anyway with a grainy cell-phone picture of the display inverted and reversed.
Icom received my HT on 9/10, and it was returned to me today, 9/30. 16 days at their shop, 4 days transit back to me. Not great, but not bad either. No complaints from me anyway.
What did they do? No clue. Radio, battery and antenna were in bubblewrap inside a box. No documentation of any sort. Was the issue fixed? Were they unable to reproduce it? No idea whatsoever. I guess time will tell.
Update: They didn’t reset my memories to factory defaults, or they did a backup and a restore when they were done. If the latter I’m very happy with that added bit of customer service.
Update #2: They sent an invoice to me via post that contained some small amount of information on what they did. Very Small. It says they “Installed modification to improve display.” and “Installed firmware update 1.41.” Still no real information, but at least they did something even if I don’t know what it was.
