Well, now I just feel dumb. Super simple repair fixes "broken" tuner

[somnif]

Story time. 5 years ago I got a new Telecaster, my first guitar from one of the "big names" rather than Squire or Epiphone. And while I love the thing, the factory set up was... well, garbage. Intonation was miles off.

My local luthier wanted 60$ to do the job, so I thought I'd try it myself first. Problem, only tuners I had were dirt cheap units that tended to wander a bit, not so useful for fine adjustments. BUT, my local used bookstore had a Peterson Strobo-stomp on their shelves for only 20$! Score, perfect. I tested it briefly with a 9V battery in the store to make sure it worked, it did, so grabbed it and brought it home.

And alas, I get my rig set up and start playing, and the screen on the thing slowly fades to white after about 20 seconds. I dust it out, check connections, all the usual rituals, to no avail. Bugger. I contact Peterson's support folks and, after a half dozen emails back and forth, they say they'd be happy to repair it. For 60$.

...

So I said screw it, payed the professional luthier the money, and the tuner has just been collecting dust for the last few years. But, I was bouncing around reddit earlier tonight and a thread brought up a mention of someone repairing screen fade on a GameGear by replacing some capacitors. Twigged a memory there so I dug in a bit, opened up the tuner, and tried to figure out what the GameGear's caps were doing and if I could ID the same parts on the tuner's boards. I google "Strobo-stomp screen capacitor" and well, I found a thread.

Apparently, Peterson got a bad batch of SMD ceramic capacitors at some point, and one wee little 0603 filter cap on the thing was bad. The repair instructions, official from Peterson themselves, are "Take some wire snips and clip it off the board". Took me 3 seconds and the Tuner works a treat now. Nice crisp screen, good solid tuning, its great.

AND THIS WASN'T A NEW FIX! Peterson new about this back in 2007! If the lady I was playing email tag had told me about this I would've had this great tuner this whole time! Argh! 

....and if I had thought to google the problem myself back then I probably would've found the same repair thread. So now I feel dumb. 

[EBK]

I once had to fix my broken Peterson strobe tuner by simply tightening the input jack.  Apparently, they use the enclosure to ground the input jack instead of a wire.  It worked its way loose during a gig, resulting in loud popping whenever I tuned between songs.  They way I characterize this is:  It doesn't matter how you wire your grounds in a pedal, until it does.