Ruined Radio - The Collins TCS12

There he would be. The closet World Service listener. No sexism here - the listener would be male and sadly, he won't have been listening on short-wave. He will have come in off a shift, come in from the pub or stumbled back from a party only to find his beloved Radio 4 LW has closed, opting over to Play of the Week on the World Service.

For my generation there were still warehouses full of ex-military kit looking for homes and all of us were experts in its restoration. If you read what I did to my AR88 in these pages, you will know that an ex is something that was and a spurt is a drip under pressure. Blaster Bates definition of an expert is not far from the truth.

The first real wage packet, all £8 of it, was blown on this solid little set affectionately known as The Cube. The shop was a weird place on Curzon Street in Derby, hoping to make a living out of militaria. It's now a wine bar. Known better as a Collins TCS 12, mine had no power supply. As a child, my PSU's always doubled as room heaters. Looking at the circuit now, it was capable of 80mA of HT max. Running a 12A6 in the local oscillator - a power beam-tetrode - with something similar biased for Everything Forward And Trust In The Lord in the audio output stage, that 80mA was easily exceeded. The mains transformer gently fried. They say the sense of smell is the most evocative for memory. I think of the TCS every time they resurface the roads.

The Local Oscillator was meant to be a power-oscillator. It radiated a very clean heterodyne across two villages. Local it wasn't.

Replacing all the capacitors for The Liquorice Allsort Series, our name for polyester types borrowed on long-term lease from work, no doubt made it better. I know I would have jacked up the screen volts for each valve whilst changing all the resistors. Here I learned about preferred values. Well, I liked them.

Whether it needed this mod is moot point. The caps were paper-block and the resistors solid carbon. Collins never used a half-watt if you could get a 3-watt in. Restorers insist you change all these. So I did.

At least with the incredible LO injection, you could use the longest of long-wires and still get a clean mix. Inexperienced ears don't know what a 3rd-order product sounds like. Today, new listeners have every noise they don't like down to a design fault. Back then, the TCS radiated better than some not-so-QRP rigs. Of the three gangs in the tuning, the oscillator was the biggest. Why? Not sure, but could have something to do with linearity.

On the Military Wireless Net, the TCS was condemned as useless due to broad selectivity. At 12 kHz, it made solid-carrier broadcast listening a real pleasure. The Two Bobs on Swiss Radio International was a joy to listen to.

Up in my room, this was all the contact I had with Real Radio and I miss them. World Service was on 5975 during the day making The Cube a real favourite.

The TCS grew a Carrier Meter, a naff loudspeaker first in the top of the case then on the front panel using a classic chrome trim nicked off an AIRMEC signal generator. The case was sprayed the inevitable FARINA GREY 9095, cans of it. It grew product detectors, infinite-impedance detectors and current-hungry audio stages.

The 600-ohm output defeated me, so this was RC coupled to an EL95 on the panel that held my mains transformer mods. This, in turn, had replaced a rack of ceramic sockets for XTAL operation at the back of the case. Unable to think of another mod and suitably ruined, I gave the TCS away.