I just started testing my rangemaster build using the road rage and I'm getting less than perfect results. Just to make sure I have things connected properly, I have a DC jack running to the +/- pads of the road rage, -9v/G connected to -9v/G on the rangemaster. When I hook it up to my tester, I get a faint signal and some response from turning the pot but nowhere near the volume I should be hearing for a boost. Did I miss something here? The road rage doc seemed pretty straight forward.
Quote from: smallpoxchampion on November 04, 2014, 08:25:56 PM
Just to make sure I have things connected properly, I have a DC jack running to the +/- pads of the road rage, -9v/G connected to -9v/G on the rangemaster.
That is correct.
Quote from: smallpoxchampion on November 04, 2014, 08:25:56 PM
When I hook it up to my tester, I get a faint signal and some response from turning the pot but nowhere near the volume I should be hearing for a boost. Did I miss something here?
Is there a reason you suspect the Road Rage board? Are you not getting -9V out? As long as you have -9V and path to ground on the Road Rage board it's doing what it needs to do.
I recommend opening a real troubleshooting thread in the Tech Help section following madbean and jkokura's instructions in this post (http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=902.0).
FWIW when I built a Rangemaster (not from the Madbean project), I found that it was very sensitive to bias. Are you able to trim R2 at all? Mine required something closer to 7k to work properly in that spot, although I was not using an OC44 and I used a 50k pot instead of 10k for the boost pot (I followed the instructions on tonefiend.com). Still, my impression is that it's very much not a one-size-fits-all circuit.
Can you power the rangemaster directly with a battery to make sure that it's working properly, take the Road Rage out of the picture. And great idea to breadboard the circuit with your transistor to get the bias right before soldering things up.
Good info in here. http://www.geofex.com/article_folders/rangemaster/atboost.pdf