From FB group Building Transistor Radios 2018-01-27 Many of the radios I’ve acquired were so corroded that I had to replace metal parts. I used tin can lids to make replacement battery holder contacts. The steel is springy enough to hold cells in place. Scissors can cut the steel, and it can be drilled and
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Also to FB group Building Transistor Radios 2018-12-31 I have several Zenith Royal 500 radios with the ‘long range’ eighth transistor added as a RF preamplifier (chassis number begins with 8). See the attached photo. This does not require a third section on the tuning capacitor, as some ‘TRF’ radios have. Zenith added a tuned
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from FB group Building Transistor Radios Joe Lima That’s good to hear. More than a year after I bought my Fluke 75 DMM (and with light use at home) I turned the switch to off but it stayed on(!!) I had to unplug the battery. Luckily it was still under the 3 year warranty, so
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from FB group Building Transistor Radios 2018-11-30 I’ve done some experimenting on volume controls that are badly worn and noisy. The idea is to substitute some resistance for the badly worn spot. The loud crackling will be reduced and the normal volume point will be moved to a higher point on the control. For a
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From FB group Building Transistor Radios 2018-10-26 I repaired a lot of old tube TVs, and I saw that the repairs were dying when it was cheaper to remove the chassis from the old TV’s beautiful wood cabinet and buy a new cheap TV and put it into the wood cabinet. It even had a
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From FB group Building Transistor Radios comment 2018-10-07 Bob Johansen I don’t have a way of calibrating an RF signal level. Back when I worked on Aircraft radios we had General Radio VHF signal generators, attenuators and RF signal strength meters and a Panoramic spectrum analyzer. This would have been a piece of cake to
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From FB group Vintage Transistor Radios There are really only two types of germanium transistors in older radios. One is for the RF and IF stages and has low collector to base capacitance. The other is audio and can handle a few hundred milliwatts. I recently replaced the germanium audio transistors with silicon, with change
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Happy New Year! I replied to a comment by George Glavas on FB group Vintage Transistor Radios George Glavas I’ve never read any documents to back up your claim that “…germanium transistors lose gain as they age.” I think that people believe this because old equipment has lost gain. But all of the problems I’ve
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I tried to to post this to the FB group Vintage Transistor Radios, but the FB app crashed and I lost several lines of my typing. Makes me angry! The radio was not making any sound. I removed the chassis from the case. I found the ‘battery saver’ slide switch had been forced apart. I
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I was the only bidder on a lot of three radios, one of them is an Olympic model 860 AM transistor radio. This radio uses four AA cells for a total of 6 volts DC. Overall the radio is in good condition – no chips or cracks. I powered it up and if I turned
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