Ruined Radio - Classic Car Radio Distroyed

While I sit waiting for the next mid-life crisis to show up, it occurs to me I have lived through about four sunspot cycles.

Each one had me going through hoops to get the best out of the kit I had at the time. Hence all those catastrophic mods listed in these pages. Anyway, it's good therapy writing about it.

Some history. About this time, thirty some years ago, a grey Rover with my initials on the plate pulled away from Derby School on our first run up to The Rose and Crown. As I write this, the Rover brand is heading to be as collectible as Eddystone and the custom plate was only a coincidence.

When you take a pub, most folk think you own the place. Not so. You rent them, then go into a thirty year war with the brewery over getting any repairs done. The Crown was an ex-coaching inn with stables at the back and lots of disused rooms.

Mine was Room 2 with an off-suite olive green bathroom and a view over the stable block and the incinerator. It got the sun for about half an hour on the morning of the solstice. It was the start of a long and happy time when everything seemed so simple - just like the bloke writing this.

Mr Barlow's car radio was powered from Dad's battery-charger, memorable for its INCREASE CHARGE rheostat and a haunting cherry-red POWER indicator. The radio was in a white wooden box, a desperate attempt to silence the steady droning hum, the reason Mr Barlow got rid of it. The vibrator PSU would wake my brother Bill when we shared a room before pub life set us up in opposite wings at The Crown. A close family.

It had the ECH Series of valves - the radio, not the pub, running from that noisy HT supply. Can't remember what I did for an antenna here but at the pub with extensive carparks and random trees, it would have been an over-the-top long-wire.

The extra stations I thought I heard were just cross-mod.

It was, after all, a car radio designed to work off a car aerial. Such was my knowledge of impedance matching, I thought bigger had to be better. Did I really try to run it off the huge mast antenna that came with the 52 Set?

Heard Athlone for the first time. Another country, another way of life. And, even then, learned from it. The tension that became The Troubles was not news to me when the story broke over here.

Radio One would have been a year away then but I can't think what the offshore scene was doing at that time. Reception must have been major stations only, the poor thing so mismatched it must have been quite deaf.

Spoiled by all this space, the engineering criterion was get as much wire in the air as possible. Antenna length was determined by the distance from the bedroom window to that tree over there.

The chaps on 80 AM spoke of these allegedly magical 66-footers but for me, size was everything. And you needed the height. The pub was three storeys high and had a valley roof. This meant you could climb out there with tremendous confidence until you looked over the edge. Then the vertigo would kick in and you'd quietly hum Nearer My God To Thee until it passed.

Ernie: Do you have vertigo?

Eric: No. I only live around the corner.