what you were saying earlier is that it might just be a blown
fuse instead of a broken
power supply?
What confuses me is that I can bring up the lights with a
hot patch but not a normal
dimmer...
If you can bring up a light on any of the three phases with a
hot patch or test
button, you have
power to all three legs. If 1/3 of your lights won't come one via test, and all the missing lights are on one
phase, then that
phase likely doesn't have any
power coming to it. Causes for this can include a blown main
fuse at the big
knife switch that turns the entire rack on and off, or, if it's a big
breaker, something broken inside the
breaker, or even something wrong outside the theater entirely (not likely, but possible).
If you can gets lights on via test from all three phases, then the
power is fine (or at least is present). If all the lights work on test, but none of them work from the
console, then you have a
console problem or a
DMX to
AMX conversion problem (assuming the
console is not the original
AMX one). If 2/3 of the lights work from the
console, then we're back to where you started, suspecting one of the three ramp cards (firing cards, trigger cards... a few different names for the same square in the flow chart).
There should be three ramp cards to the right in the card tray, and the 12 control cards to the left. You shouldn't need to disturb the control cards.
If I'm remembering right, there should be a small glass
fuse between the main
power bus bars (big copper bars in the back of the rack) and the
circuit card, if that
fuse is popped it would stop the card from working (
fuse might be on the card itself, it's been a while since I looked closely at an
AMX card). If the
fuse is good, and the missing
phase follows the card around when you move it from slot to slot, then it's definitely a bad card.
You might want to suggest to your local powers-that-be that they should start saving up about $10,000 to have the rack rebrained with a new
processor, they've been lucky that the
AMX cards have lasted this long. The rate of failure is only going to increase.
