Getting to dislike tantalum caps

At 08:17 AM 2/14/2010 -0800, you wrote: I bought a Tek 7904 scope on e-pay, a frame-and-4-plugins design. At least 4 of the tants on the power supply were shorted, so I ordered new ones to replace all the tantalums in the power supply. I think I spent $25 at Digikey. Works great now. I thought the caps the leaked on PC motherboards were aluminum electrolytics. ISTR that some guy defected from the Chinese factory where they were made and stole the formula for the electrolyte so he could start up somewhere else, but there were additional chemicals added after the solution was first made up and his formula didn't tell him anything about the later steps, so all of his caps failed after various amounts of time in-circuit. ----- 85. [Science Fiction] "Even the AI hated [my book] ?" "The AI _loved_ it. That's when we knew for sure that _people_ were going to hate it." --Dan Simmons, _Hyperion_ --... ...-- -.. . -. ----. --.- --.- -... tpeters at nospam.mixcom.com (remove "nospam") N9QQB (amateur radio) "HEY YOU" (loud shouting) WEB: http://www.mixcom.com/tpeters 43? 7' 17.2" N by 88? 6' 28.9" W, Elevation 815', Grid Square EN53wc WAN/LAN/Telcom Analyst, Tech Writer, MCP, CCNA, Registered Linux User 385531