calmdownkidder
Offline
Liverpool, UK

Hi

Note: My level is 'absolute and utter n00b' - I literally have no experience in this field, so feel free to patronise as much as possible!

What I have - Mega Drive 2, Soldering Iron, Solder Wire, Phono RCA Panel Mount Solder Connector Sockets.

I'm looking to add RCA ports onto my Mega Drive 2 as the aerial connection is starting to show signs of wearing down, and I've heard this mod improves the clarity of the A/V somewhat. I can't find any step-by-step guides to adding these, but I was sent this image:

Which seems fair enough, but someone else has said I would need to add connections to ground as well as the a/v connectors seen in the image - what I'm asking is where would the ground be, and is it a case of soldering that connection to the exsiting connection?

What would be perfect is if someone had photos of the various stages, something like that would be very useful to me!

If anyone could help, I'd really appreciate it!

concretedog
Offline
the heart of a mountain

I've never done this so this is based on the image and nothing else....

It looks to me as if the two right audio points and the two left audio points each are on the same trace on the circuit board...meaning that the two solder blobs indicated for the right audio are connected to the same bit of the circuit.  My guess would be that you would have to solder a wire to either of these and connect that to the tip of your RCA as the signal...the same for the left output...solder a wire to either of the blobs marked left audio to the tip of the other RCA.

The sleeve of the 2 RCA sockets would need to be connected to ground as you said...you can find ground usually by working out where the negative power supply joins the circuit and trace it that way...it is also usual for the ground trace of the circuit board to run round the edge of the board a lot of the time.

Hope this helps!

wedanced
Offline
San Francisco

did this a while ago. it works pretty well.