KF7LZE Radio & Technology

I’ve finally had the time to finish one of my long-running projects repairing GE’s most powerful radio offering from 1937, the GE F-135. I picked it up from Craigslist back in November but other responsibilities kept me from getting much done on it until the 1st of this year. Finally, after a few months waiting, it’s finished and playing!

The radio came to me complete and in decent shape for the age. It’s missing the glass for the dial, but is otherwise completely intact and the finish isn’t in bad shape despite a few scratches here and there.

This radio is the current king of my collection. The best radio GE sold in 1937, it has a lot of innovative features – early APEX hi-fi reception, dual 6L6 output tubes putting out 20W of audio to a large and rich-sounding 12″ speaker; a total of 13 tubes including a tuned RF stage, dual IF stages, separate oscillator and “station seeking” automatic frequency correction.

Under the chassis it’s in decent shape too. It looks like it has been worked on before a few times – there are some ’40s, a ’50s and a couple of ’90s capacitors installed. There’s a sticker from a Seattle-area Jukebox Repair store on the back which probably explains the more-recent repairs; I looked up the address and they don’t seem to be around anymore.

First thing first after doing the complete set of intake checks on the radio, I gave the cabinet a thorough scrubbing and hit it with Howard Restore-a-Finish and it came out beautifully. The intake checks were uneventful so I didn’t take any photos, but the power transformer, all the IF transformers, oscillator and antenna and RF coils and the speaker transformer and coils were just fine. After applying the Howard’s, it really cleaned up the fading and covered over a couple of small scratches and really brought out the natural shine on the wood.

Then I tested all the tubes and found that most were in good shape (especially the 6L6G tubes installed) there were a few 6J5 and 6K7 tubes that needed replaced. I had these in stock and so it was easy to solve that problem.

I worked on this one under my kitchen’s vent hood as it’s currently too cold to vent soldering fumes outside. The chassis stand is the right width though so that’s perfect.

Every paper and filter capacitor needed replaced, as well as nearly every single one of the resistors which had drifted as much as +100% in value in some cases. Fortunately the coils are all intact or this could’ve been a much messier repair.

I also found a couple of places where the previous repairman who worked on the set may have been dyslexic, as there were a couple places were numbered resistors were reversed – i.e. R23 being in R32′s place and so forth. I imagine that couldn’t have made it work any better, anyway. I tested and replaced going along from the bottom up as needed. These are in-progress shots, so you might see a couple places where leads aren’t trimmed or components aren’t yet soldered. All of those issues were taken care of but might not have made it into the photo series.

Small caps dealt with, it was time to replace the multi-section caps. There is a 4-section can, insulated from the chassis, mounted up top with a set of 2 filter caps and 2 cathode-bypass caps. These all ran to a hole in the chassis where they went above. I snipped the long cross-chassis leads and moved the components close to their intended locations. In this photo, I’ve replaced the 10uF cathode bypass capacitor with its replacement. I like using bipolar caps for the large-value cathode bypasses but that’s just my preference and what I keep in stock (I keep those values around for repairing crossovers in old speakers) but you could use a standard polarized capacitor there.

Here’s the totally-complete underside shot.

There’s still a matter to deal with above the chassis, though. This is an AFC radio which uses a special and complicated transformer heading into the diode which recovers the audio. And it has a small resistor which is reading double it’s value and needs replaced as well, or it won’t align right.

Then I sealed the can back up:

I hooked the speaker and pushbutton assembly up on the bench and gave it a test run – it fired up immediately and started pulling in a few stations even on the Shortwave bands. The dial was off alignment a bit though, so it was time for that.

For the alignment, I pulled up the signal generator and started with an IF alignment before going back to the RF stages. This radio has a special IF arrangement with a procedure, so I aligned the 3rd IF primary, second IF secondary and primary, first IF secondary and primary, then went back and aligned the 3rd IF secondary that feeds into the diode. Aligning that discriminator was a maddening 10 minutes spent trying to nudge the adjustment ever so slightly. My goal was to get 0V between two segments, but it approached that point at an incredibly steep slope. I managed to get it there, though.

The original 0V spec was made with a primitive meter; I’ll take 0.01 on a more sensitive modern instrument. That’s perfect IF alignment. It was definitely worth it though. Now onto the RF, which involved tweaking something like 16 trimmers in a precise order with an RF signal generator at various frequencies.

Finally, it was all set! Time to reassemble.

At this point, the radio plays beautifully and pulls in stations from all over, and I’ve added a line input to let me hook up an audio source. The hassle of the AFC calibration was definitely worth it, it’s nearly like magic to watch it work. With the switch off, the radio tunes sharply and a station comes in over just a few degrees of rotation. With the switch activated, it’s like an entirely different radio – the same station will come in across about a quarter-turn of the knob, 2 divisions in either direction from the center frequency and it will block quieter stations from interfering.

The radio sounds great with a pretty good frequency response and more volume than I know what to do with, too. The relay for the motor is burnt out, though. I missed that on the initial checks so when I went to test the pushbutton function…I got a whole lot of nothing. I’ll make another post here when I do get the motor resolved but for now I’m going to hang this one up and start playing it. This was a very fun and enjoyable project and I have a beautiful radio with a commanding presence to enjoy for many years to come.

 

I’ve had this idea for quite a few years but haven’t put much time into it, between everything else I’ve been going on. Once or twice a year for the past five or so years, I’ve posted on Craigslist seeking a broken cello to turn into an art project. Finally, the ad hit and I think I can make it happen.

Verve//Remixed 3 has an incredible album cover. You should buy their music for that reason alone.

I’m hoping to make my own version of the Cello Boombox on the cover…and this will be my starting point, a cello with a broken neck the owner wasn’t interested in repairing. The neck snapped off, the bridge is missing, and there are quite a few cracks (although they aren’t visible unless you look closely) and it needs to be re-glued.

I doubt I’ll do anything with this until next year at least, but now it’s a possibility. I’m just glad I was able to find a broken cello, I wasn’t willing to destroy a functional instrument for this. Not to mention, a working cello costs a lot of money.

There are a few things to consider:

Speaker size and placement. How many drivers will I use, and what types?

Cabinet volume and phase cancelling. If I configure this as a stereo boombox, I’d need to isolate the enclosures internally from each other or the out-of-phase parts of the left and right channels of the audio could cancel or introduce distortion.

Audio source. The Verve Remixed album cover is concept art, not a real product, so the knobs and panel meters and a floppy disk drive aren’t things I could realistically include. Do I mount a small music player in the center – maybe an iPod Touch, or a small Android tablet? Or should I just make this into an artistic speaker without its own audio source?

Power. If this is going to have its own amplifier, how am I going to power it? An outboard power pack? Rechargeable batteries inside?

If anyone has suggestions on those design topics, I’d love to hear them, or from anyone else who has attempted a project like this.

A recent random assortment of ideas:

It’s easy to get media content from a computer to a television, but it’s difficult to get any kind of external media back into a computer. I have a fairly involved computer setup at home. My workstation is connected to two 20″ monitors and a 46″ LCD. A friend was in town for the weekend, and we were looking for an easy way to make a YouTube video play from his laptop onto my monitor, without actually taking away my control of it. I have two sets of input devices, one at my desk and one near the couch, to control the computer when it’s being used for media. We ended up just switching off who had control of the single mouse cursor between the two input devices. The ideal solution? Either multiple mouser pointers, assigned to the unique input combinations – or a VGA capture interface to make another computer’s input appear in a window. VGA capture devices exist but are absurdly expensive, and there’s no multi-pointer support in the operating system. Most laptops these days have dropped an analog TV output in favor of HDMI or DisplayPort outputs meaning they can’t be connected to an inexpensive TV-capture card.

At about the six month mark, as expected, my phone has started acting up. This has been the case with most every smartphone I’ve owned – a Nokia running S60, an HTC 8525 running Windows Mobile 6.5, a G1, and now my G2 running Android. Reliably at about the six month mark they’ve all started acting up in ways that make me suspect the hardware is failing: lockups and reboots, screen glitches, data disappearing off the memory card randomly and visible dust between the LCD and the glass so deep in the phone the only way I can see it getting in is via osmosis. Hard reset doesn’t fix the problem. Have even high-end smartphones become disposable commodities?

Hallicrafters 8R40 Upgrade: On the back of my bench I have a Hallicrafters 8R40 radio receiver from 1953. It will be a good performing radio when I’m through fixing it up, and I’ll be using it to try and pick up long distance contacts. One thing about far away faint signals is that they can be tough to hear even with the audio turned all the way up, the 8R40 only has a single-ended 6V6 output that maxes out around 4.5W of audio power into a not-that-efficient speaker.  From Parts-Express, I bought a few Dayton Audio DTA-2 Class T amplifier modules, based on a Tripath TA-2024 chip. They’ll pump out about 20W of power. I’m planning to use one of these modules inside the back of the Hallicrafters to allow it to drive an external speaker at 20W in a reversible modification. I expect I’ll split the detector’s output and use the module amplifier for the external speaker only; leaving the build-in speaker powered by the tube.

I’m looking for a new summer project, and think I’m going to branch off from repairing radios to building some of my own gear. I’m interested in making a tube hi-fi stereo amplifier to go with my old speakers – and it’s something I can build. Audiophiles, guitar enthusiasts, and other people into tube audio have driven the price of most of the good audio tubes higher than I’m interested in paying, though.

The 6V6 audio tube is known and loved by enthusiasts everywhere, and came in a variety of other versions with different ratings, different glass, different power supply requirements but pretty much all produce the same output. I’m interested in making a miniature-tube amplifier, so I’ll be starting with the 6AQ5A tube – but these are pretty expensive. An alternately powered version, the 5AQ5 goes for only about $2/each so that looks like a winner.

I’ll be basing my amplifier on the Silvertone 69A, a dual-channel push-pull stereo amplifier manufcatured in 1960. This amplifier used a 5U4 rectifier tube to supply the high voltage. By replacing the tube rectifier (right, above) with a pair of 1N4007 silicon diodes (left, above) I’ll free up the 5V power supply. A set of four 5AQ5s draws 2.4A of current; a 5U4 draws 3A of current so there’s more power to spare and a guarantee of being able to find cheap hi-fi tubes for years to come without a lot of competition.

The schematic – with some bias and output mods – not showing the power supply or output tube modifications – that I’m basing the design is here (click for larger version!):

This should be a good sounding little amp if I get around to actually completing construction. I have most of the iron [transformers] in stock already, it’s just a question of buying some hardware and spending the time required to wire it. We’ll see.

This is what happens when you connect the high level output of an audio amplifier, to an input designed to be hooked up to an MP3 player or other line level audio source. This Aiphone PA amplifier was incorrectly installed by a technician and it made this 1/2W resistor dissipate about 40W. It held up…briefly…but quickly turned into a charred mess. It was somehow managing to pass a terribly distorted signal but didn’t damage any other components. After replacing the resistor on this pictured unit, and another identical one damaged the same way, it was back in service.

It’s not always overly aggressive cost engineering that makes things fry. Sometimes it is actually operator error.