More Radios Ruined

...or Bob Ellis - the Wilderness Years.

I shall be 45 this year. 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. I've come out now...

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"

The other great love at that time was Hi-Fi. Even then, it seemed ridiculously expensive and had a certain snobbery by being priced in guineas. Units of £1.05 to you.

The PYE Concerto was the classic KT66/GZ32/ECC33/ECC35 line-up in an ultra-linear configuration. The pre-amp used ECC41s. Noisy, especially in the GRAM mode. It was profoundly microphonic, ringing out like church bells when you tapped the case.

The tuner was a QUAD, almost ignored as there was only LIGHT, THIRD and HOME on VHF. I knew if you were running KT Series valves in the output stages, you were up there with the Big Boys. My idea of housework was to remove the valves now and again to clean them. Made them sound better. This sounds daft but reading today's audio press where you can buy a CD cleaner spray for £35, a plinth for the player to sit on, a mere £450 and special cables - sorry, interconnects - for anything up to £1000. My stupidity came in a lot cheaper.

Disaster. Broke off the locating spigot on the GZ32 valve base. Putting back incorrectly, it linked the raw AC HT over to the reservoir caps resulting in an explosion that rocked the place. It did £25 worth of damage. You may have bought your Hi-Fi in safely up-market guineas but repairs are the work of an artisan so you are back to honest working-class pounds...

Back to radio, then. After being laughed out of the Derby & District Amateur Radio Club Home-brew Competition, I thought I'd have a go at going commercial. A CODAR CR70A. This radio introduced me to The 1930 Net, the Top Band natter-net on 1930KHz at 1930GMT. With the closure of the Coastal Stations this June, it's good to hear 160m alive again.

It fitted well on my bedside table - you could almost read by the dial lamps. Was it RNI or a parallel interest in Hi-Fi that has embedded Lucky Man by Emerson Lake & Palmer in my memory? And to think ELP are now the theme to The Generation Game. Proof that nothing is sacred.

Did I modify the Codar?

Er, the normal output stage was a Class A ECC81 but with the EZ80 rectifier usurped by silicon, it made way for a 6BW6. A wonderful "radiogram" quality due to hideous mis-matching. Minutes of happy listening until the mains transformer burnt out...

It was replaced by a PCR Receiver. I liked this little radio. Made by Philips Lamps, it was really a domestic set made up for NAAFI Service. It was chosen because the dial lamps shone as bright as the CODAR so I could carry on reading in bed. How I don't know...

Little? The PCR was about the size of a PC base unit. Small in the world of militaria.

New readers now know you are dealing with high-end engineering. It needed the best test equipment. The best you could get for £22. The HARTLEY ELECTROMOTIVES 13A OSCILLOSCOPE was the toy of toys. Dual beam with only 807-class valves for gain to a 5-inch tube with 3000 volts on the plate, it got as hot as hell. Spent most of its time monitoring audio, stuff like Walter Carlos' Switched On Bach, the nearest I ever got to drugs.

Don't try this at home

Use a 'scope as a TV Monitor. To do this, feed CRT cathode signal via Z MOD link to 'scope. Bond 'scope earth return across to a live TV chassis and take X & Y drive from the timebases. Watch Vision On in a 3" x 4" green/black display with a perfectly good 21 inch monochrome picture on the telly right next to it.

A proper radio at last?

I had made a few trips to Matlock to hear the wit and wisdom of  Bill Lowe, not knowing that many years later he would be my boss. My learned Chairman went on the record saying, "Eddystone receivers are like chocolate eclairs, delicious to look at but when you bite into them, there is little of substance..."

The thing 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 PSU 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 sound 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 and drink 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. Why? All I had to do was fit a series 10k and a 32uF 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. I was cured of the need to modify everything, Doctor. 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 to?

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 back in September, 1980.

That was about the last time I made a serious investment in radio. The use of audio processing on FM makes radio listening a chore these days. All those years of short-wave educate your ears to hear more. Processing is applied for those who won't listen. As I write this, the trade press are carrying articles on processing for DAB. Enough, I think...

And the most reliable radios I've ever had?

At a time when Lowes took the radio high ground, TRIO launched the R11. A portable with no SSB, it was a BC-only entry-level receiver but way below JW's expectations. It is still in use today. The original maker was TOSHIBA, my R11 is a world model lacking LW but you can't have everything. JW gave me this set as a morale-booster but more likely it was cheaper than returning it to Japan...

The record goes to an SRX50. On for a minimum of three hours a day, every day since 1992. I'd played with a few entry-level sets, but this idiosyncratic radio was chosen as the clock-radio to Wake Up To Wogan.

The big radio is an AR7030. I wonder if there are any interesting mods for it...