I've just bought a F14 Tomcat, which I could get for a good price, given it needs some maintenance. The upper (alphanumeric) displays are broken. The previous owner told me that they broke, and that he had them replaced, but they broke again after two weeks.

So my guess is the problem must be somewhere else. I've heard the power board can cause such problems, but I don't know what to look for.

Because two replacement glass displays are about just as expensive as a complete LED-unit, I think i might get a new LED display unit. But that doesn't fix the source of the problem of course

Also, the upper TOMCAT targets don't work, and the Yagov kickback doesn't work. It gets some switch errors on startup, but I cant really run any tests because the displays don't work

Any thoughts?

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There's a white, -looks like- burnt spot on the bottom left of both displays (see photos). Is that normal? Or does it indicate that the display is burned out?

Can I use a floppy or IDE ribbon cable to rule out that is the culprit, or is the pinout different?

I was suggested to flip over the cable on either side to see if that would make any difference. It did not, unfortunately. I will take a closer look at the displays once I have some spare time.

Thanks for all the responses!

I had some spare time to look into the issues. I took a good look at the display board and saw that both top displays seem to have a crack in them on the bottom left side. So I guess they are broken...

I also saw that the Q42 transistor seems to have been replaced before, because the solder looks newer, and it looks different from the other ones in the row. Could it be the wrong one?

I'll measure the voltages on the power supply later. Im not yet sure whether to replace the glass, or go with a LED board....