This last weekend, I decided to rearrange my wife's office. One of the first things that I did was to disconnect my first generation Airport Base Station (Graphite) so I could take some shelves down. After the office was clean and the shelves back up, we were ready to get back on the net, and that's when the fun started.

The Airport Base Station refused to turn back on! I could hear a light "sizzling" sound as the status lights flashed, and I knew instantly that the capacitors had failed, a common ailment with these old base stations.

So, of course I needed to fix the base station! Why buy new when you can repair, right?

Following the fantastic instructions provided by Constantin von Wentzel on this page, I was able to see what needed to be done. It had been a while since I had visited his site, but I did recall that at least one component needed to be replaced. It turns out it was two capacitors, and they are replaceable with high quality parts from electrical suppliers (the web page gives links, and part numbers). I ran out to Radio Shack the next AM and bought some low quality temporary replacements, and quickly soldered them onto the board replacing the badly bulged and obviously defective caps.

So. The moral of this story is, if you have a first generation Graphite base station, take a few minutes and take it apart to make sure things are working correctly. You may avoid a nasty surprise!

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