Pico micro demods failing

I have a system in a motel which has 6 Pico micro demods. I have allready replaced two of them, and now three more have had their audio outputs drop way down. Turning up the audio output all the way, and turning up the audio level of the mods they are connected produces a sub-standard scratchy-sounding audio that is understandable, but irritating.

Anyone else having this problem?

I recently picked up a new customer whose rack included seven BT mini-demods. One had no output, two others had really ugly video. They were one month out of warranty (3 years). BT is waiting for parts to repair one or more of these, but told me that the standard out-of-warrantylabor charge is $30 per mini-mod.

This new customer then referred me to another new customer who has a rack with two bad BT mini-demods out of five. His repairs will be under warranty. I don't expect 40% failure rates from Blonder-Tongue. Pico now has a 5 year warranty on headend products. I hope they stay in business long enough to make it mean something.

I haven't bought any Holland mini-demods, but I had mediocre perfornamce with the video modulation on several mini-mods, and two out of the 23 that I bought had RF output failures within the first year.

If I need demods, I will probably buy full-sized rack mounted ones, or maybe try Drake.

I've had a lot of the full-size BT demods go out also. Usually, the display is just showing a decimal point in the lower right corner. To fix that condition, I take off the cover of the unit and find the small re-set button on the circuit board. That usually cures the problem, and only takes 10 minutes or so. I wish they had pre-drilled the cover to save me some time.