A Quick Look At The Classics
The 19 Set
A birthday present in the mid-Seventies. Bought from John's Radio in Bradford for around twenty quid, mine was that bit more expensive as I had the PSU too.
No manual. In the dying hours of my birthday, decided to go through all the pins on the O/P socket looking for audio with a multi-meter. Found it and Luxembourg on 6.09 Mc/s. Luxy opted out of it German Service at 1915 for a dose of religion then into The Great 208 at half-past.
Odd to think that Fred was on GB2RS duty with DADARS News even then. Tom Darn was one of the contributors, some are still at it today. Tried a goniometer but, then as now, don't know what it was supposed to do. Something to do with phase?
For serious gain, link in the I/C Amplifier. This was for mic/headset comms in the tank but here, with it's transformer input/output 6V6, gave the set a real output stage. Some has a B SET for VHF, but in all cases the TX was disabled. You had to find 500v for the 807's plate for about 40W of suppressor- grid modulated AM off a carbon mike. And we won the war with these?
The Eddystone 940
A proper radio at last? Very good condition but...
As a new recruit to the EUG, recoiling from Bill Lowe's comments, my learned Chairman who went on the record saying, "some receivers are like chocolate eclairs, delicious to look at but when you bite into them, there is little of substance". His remark was probably based on the little EC10, a radio I had a deal of fun with...
But the big Eddystone was a 940 all right but when you picked it up, it didn't seem to have the rib-snapping weight I expected and a Plessey plug where we hoped to find a power lead. It had no power supply...
The sub-chassis was in place but there was nothing on it. This 940 was
hoping to get its power from somewhere else...
We lovingly made up a PSU with a transformer from a Vortexion WVB tape machine,
decoupled up to the eye-balls against mains and modulation hum. I remembered
Eddystones are noted for their audio so lets make the most of it. When we
plugged in, nothing happened. Everything lit up but that was it. Bags of HT, a
reassuring blue glow from the stabiliser valve - but silence. It was nice to
see that after all this time, not even the S Meter zero needed adjustment but
it was still very quiet. A good antenna had the meter dancing about but an end-
stopping signal only gave the quietest and most distorted signal known to man.
My chocolate eclair Chairman remarked I was wasting my time as every resistor will have gone high and every condenser will have gone low. Not so. Abandoning the Company's electronic fault analysis systems for my AVO 8, I started prodding. Everything was as close to the book as parallax error would allow - except for one. Not a volt to be had on the audio stage anode. And, Mr. Chairman, the anode load resistor was fine...
In this special release, the HT input was split. A main supply to all stages and a decoupled supply just for the audio amplifier. All I had to do was fit a series 10k and a 32æF stage decoupler to turn this into one of the most driveable radios I've ever had. All I did to it in four years was rub a little WD40 into the cursor support bar as the pointer carrier would squeak when you spun the tuning from one end of the scale to the other. Then it happened...
Very slowly, one by one, each BBC station became slightly distorted. A curious sort of distortion, some parts of the audio spectrum sounding more distorted than the rest. The Chairman's Rising Resistor problem? No - some stations sounded odd, others did not. Bite the bullet. Write to the BBC...
Why were the Domestic Services now so tiring to listen too? As
something of a writer on radio issues, I had heard that audio processing was
becoming big business in the States. I learned that all AM broadcasters are now
using some form of audio processing to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. There
was a time when the quality of the sound from your radio was determined by how
much you were prepared to pay for it. And that Eddystone had it - the
unprocessed sound of Radio 1 back in the Seventies was magic on the 940. But
not any more.
The 940 was good enough to spot the start of the use of OPTIMOD
on the 14th September, 1980.
Nostalgia: Is There a Future For It?
Whiling away a wet afternoon looking at a few back-issues of the trade press, I'm reading an article in which John Wilson has a go at the R107.
I worked for, and with, John Wilson for about twelve
years up at the Matlock Emporium. They say you only get eight
for Aggravated Burglary but I digress.
In that time John demonstrated a life-times radio
engineering experience allied to a powerful sense of the
aesthetic. I, on the other hand, have a somewhat shorter life-
times experience married to a sense of the faintly ridiculous.
What John has missed entirely is the value of the oversized Military wireless as a replacement for furniture and as a fashion statement. The first radio to have pretensions toward being a bedside table was a SETS RECEIVING: CANADIAN NO 52, a rather large Christmas present given as a bribe for peace back in 1963. Our house already had things the grown-ups called "occasional tables". OK then, the 52 was occasionally a table and mostly a radio. It was smuggled into the house under cover of darkness after delivery from Everybody's Store in Coxbench - a Derbyshire village name first to fall foul of my schoolboy humour. They were glad to see the back of it, no doubt.
It came with an enormous power supply, the on/off switch - based on a design stolen from the set of an early Hammer horror film - placed jauntily above the power output socket. This was a Bakelite casting, an International Octal surface mount with the pins standing proud above the front panel. If you switched on without the plug in, your finger would come down on the HT pin, initiating an early form of aerobics. Health and Safety legislation has taken so much from the hobby...
The 52 SET got me cricket from the antipodes, merry greeting from Tirana and the start of a lifetimes listening to World Service. Then the Empire and General Overseas Service of The BBC, now World Service Radio and almost unlistenable.
Remembering those early days, we recently set off on a pilgrimage to Coxbench - only to find that Everybody's Store is now a part of the elevated section of the A38. The pub is still there, though. We were able to test that...
Among the things the 52 SET lacked, apart from sensitivity, selectivity, frequency accuracy or stability, were the broadcast bands. If you were an AM DX'er in those days it meant the only receiver to have was an R1155. John likes those. Mine had a vibrator power supply, a curious electro-mechanical method of producing the high voltage needed for the valves from a car battery - and not what you are thinking. Receiving at maximum gain drew thirteen amps or more, requiring an overnight battery charging session if we were to catch the jazz next day from Allouis. We must have listened in a constant heady atmosphere of hydrogen and oxygen from the fizzing cells which probably explains this writing style...
You see, the R1155 had no audio stages. You either listened on an ex-Army headset (the original design based on a wireless operator who had ears in a different place to the rest of us) or you ripped out the DF or Radio Direction Finding part of the set and fitted a little amplifier. This was a 6J5G, a 6Q5G if you wanted bags of gain and microphony, into a Class A 6V6G. These are classic valve types that will mean nothing to a generation brought up on MOSFET current-dumpers and long-tailed pairs. I belong to a generation that regarded the sub-miniature 6V6GT as a form of hi-tech. Anyway, this power duo got you two- and-a-half watts of pure distortion.
The height of technical snobbery at that time was to strap the anodes together with a 1.5Mê resistor so each one of us who did this could lay claim to be the "inventor" of negative feedback. Being a good old fashioned self-publicist, I "invented" my own form of negative feedback. This was to connect the secondary of the output transformer in series with the output valve's cathode by-pass capacitor. Yes, I know Quad was doing it at the output of their Series 2 amplifiers, but the self-taught will never acknowledge plagiarism.
I digress, again. Then there was the R107. This was a seaman's chest of a radio, doubling as a larger bedside table than the 52 Set. Power was presented to an R107 via a Mil-spec connector that was nearly the size of the old two-pin kettle plug. The writer, as a young man, thought they had simply got hold of a duff kettle socket so applied the plug with a toffee hammer. This was the node for all the electrics, the table lamp atop the R107 and a fan heater. You could get all the wires in if you removed the cable clamp from the kettle plug - and all this with no earth, Health and Safety take note... How we made it to adulthood, I'll never know.
At least the R107 had plenty of room inside for modifications. In those days, a man was judged by the size of his output stage. Build bigger, better - get the maximum wattage into your cottage. By the time the R107 got it's new output stage, we were dicing with death. It had ultra-linear push-pull KT66's with four hundred volts on the plate. When Radio Caroline came on-air, the whole street knew about it.
The case was painted a satanic black. Two breeze blocks
got the same treatment and went underneath as legs - a bedside
table weighing in at about two hundredweight. The nights were
lost listening to King Crimson on Big L's Perfumed Garden with
one John Peel. No one could have heard the doorbell. The man
wanted to buy The Radio From Hell, cost no object. For a fiver,
the R107 made it's final journey. It had fought and won a war
for us - on the beaches, in the air and in my bedroom. Never
before had so much been done for so little...
A month later it was spotted in a recce by my troops. Seen in a
garden near Brailsford, the black case sans radio, the lovingly
restored front panel replaced by chicken wire and two rabbits.
And at the going down of the sun and in the morning, I still
remember it.
Then there was the AR88D. Mine came in an oak case with the offer of a free hernia. Even then, there was a curious kind of inverted snobbery. If you were a "proper" short wave listener who listened to Hams and anything that was not Radio Moscow, you had the AR88D. If you enjoyed long-wave listening you were but a pretender to the hobby and had the AR88LF. These were seen by the hard-core as "not a real communications receiver" and people would turn their backs at radio rallies. I always wanted one. My AR88D is remembered for it's excellent audio on which Radio Northsea International accompanied exam revision. Remember Kenny Everett, who never quite got up in time for his Kenny and Cash breakfast show at Capital Radio, then on 539m - that's metres, by the way - "on the Medium Rave Band".
To have that audio quality available for the music stations on long-wave would have been utopian. The Moscow Home Service then on 173 - that's kilohertz, by the way - played doom-laden pieces of the Russian classics that matched my teenage angst to a tee. (Short pause while broadcast antenna designers fall about at that last pun. I could be waiting a long time)
Anyway, Monday evenings ritual walk from The Rose and Crown pub - no drink problem, we used to live there, honest - lead to G3PTT's farm and a chance to drive the coveted AR88LF. There was (and still is) not a power on earth that would make him part with it. At the time of going to press he is still using it. Enough of this.
Space does not allow for all the radio stories. If I am
to suffer arthritis in the hands in later life, it will be down
to tuning an HRO with a Top Band bandspread coil-pack. The real
HRO men would scour the rallies for the wooden case that held
the coil-packs and spend a dog's age restoring it with teak oil
as the rest of the furniture in the house fell apart...
The rites of passage when you get your first Racal RA17 with the
rites of massage as the chiropractor tries to fix your back.
The defensive remarks when you tell them down at the club that
your other radio is an Eddystone 840C...
The career-long friend who took you to the Derby Rally where you
picked up a 62 SET, the same friend who hit the talk-bar as you
rigged the aerial to see if you had a future as a dummy load.
The games master who made you Net Controller for Derby School
CCF Operations; Map Exercises, who could not understand why
Geneva was concerned that Radio Silence was filled with Pink
Floyd albums on three NATO frequencies. Had enough?
We won't see radio like that again. All I wish is that the new generation of listeners get the same sense of pioneering fun we did. Perhaps in forty years time, SWM will carry a nostalgic piece about the day the wife used an AOR AR7030 as a door stop. Oh, how we all laughed.
