A Quick Look At The Classics Owned By The Author

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.