I want to mod my Saitek P3000 gamepad

[Frogmelon]

Hi all I've got two Saitek P3000 900Mhz wireless gamepads and I want to use both of them together.

This would be easy if I was in the States cos over there they have an A/B switch to change channels.

I'm living in the UK and my gamepads don't have the A/B switch. I got in touch with Saitek and they say due to licensing restrictions they couldn't sell the gamepad with two channels on the 900Mhz band in my country. They said I should return the pads for a newer model which is 2.4Ghz where the restriction doesn't apply. This will be difficult as the first one I've got is out of warranty and the second one I just got off Ebay

I've opened the base station up and can see where I need to solder the switch. I can see a crystal on the pcb, together with a spot just underneath where another crystal might go (X302). On the rear of the pcb it looks like a trimmer/potentiometer/variable capacitor is missing (CB2) and two surface mount capacitors/resistors (CB1 and R305).

Could somebody open up their P3000 receiver (really easy - three screws and then pop off the silver section to get the pcb out) and maybe post some photos of the 900Mhz US version, so I can see what's different about the components. I can't see there's gonna be any radical differences which a soldering iron can't put right lol

Also, how do you folks in the states change the a/b channels on the gamepad? I've sort of made out you do it with the analog/digital buttons. I'm wondering if a mod needs to be done to the actual gamepad as well....

PS: Just found out last night you can slide off the cover of the battery packs Nowhere in any review have I seen this mentioned - they all seem to think the battery packs are non-standard. Inside the battery packs are 2 AAAM NIMH cells which are easy to replace. One of my packs wasn't charging so I took a look inside and fixed it by scraping off some sort of corrosion around one of the terminals, which fixed the problem. I can see the potential here to make a battery pack that takes AAA cells instead of AAAM for longer gamepad playing time!

[dippyskoodlez]

hmm.. I'd be glad to help ya if I had one of those, but maybe they will take em back and upgrade ya for a smaller price than the new gamepad itself, even though the warranty is out, seeing as this, I dont think is a "warranty" replacement anyways.. they may just swap ya, just cuz your a customer some companys still are nice... occasionally..

[Frogmelon]

I replied to Saitek support saying they were out of warranty therefore could not really take them back to the shop, but would I be able to return them direct to the manufacturer - no reply yet. They would be very nice people if they did lol

I'm guessing on the US version the switch on the receiver simply switches between the two crystals - hence two frequencies/channels. I'm tempted to open up the gamepad to see if there's a matching crystal. All I'd really need to do if that was the case is replace the crystals in both receiver and gamepad with crystals of a different frequency. I'll keep you posted once I've opened the gamepad.

[Circaflex]

cant help you but your sig is way too long just thought id point it out

[Frogmelon]

Nooooo I need to add more stuff! More more! Yeah ok I will cut the pointless stuff (tm) out of it lol