Category Archives: Post war

The RMB is an early Roberts battery and mains portable radio. It’s superbly engineered and as such was very easy to restore. The outward appearance might be considered a little bit utilitarian by some. The unit just needed a new paper/wax capacitors to be replaced. The power supply which included selenium rectifiers was ok once the contacts on the battery/mains changeover switch were cleaned.

This was an interesting conversion, I had bought a beaten up old Roberts 200 radio case, missing speaker, chassis and electronics. I thought maybe it could be turned into something nice, after my experience with the RT1 I had red leather paint leftover and wanted to use it. So, I had a few ideas, and thought with the availability of modular amplifiers and Bluetooth circuits, I could built something that would integrate into that cabinet. A 4″ two-way car speaker was used to replace the missing Rola unit. The top […]

Whilst on holiday in the Isle of Wight, I happened upon this little radio in a vintage shop, I found it very interesting so I after checking market prices of it on eBay, I made an offer. Interestingly, the shop keeper wouldn’t budge on price, so I took it anyway, and as I also found another identical radio on eBay, I bought and collected that one on the way home too! I’ve always found pre-transistor portables very interesting as they use really efficient little valves that run a 1.5v heater, […]

Technically this was quite a high spec radio, it has an RF pre-amplifier with a three gang tuning capacitor (one for pre-amp input, pre-amp output and local oscillator) It has a built in frame aerial and is extremely sensitive. That’s the upside. The downside was that it came to me in a very sorry state, there was lots of rust on the chassis that had to be dealt with. Three of the valves were faulty, the mixer oscillator valve broke in half on removal and the loudspeaker’s cone had been […]

This is a nice user friendly AM radio from the mid-50s. It has a built in frame aerial which means you can use it anywhere in the house. It’s a simplified chassis compared to the big PE80 that I did previously. Simple 5 valve design, single ended class-A audio amplifier. Controls are easy to use, four knobs with on-off/tone, volume, tuning and band. It does LW, MW and two short wave bands, and works really well. Restoration wise, there wasn’t much wrong with the electronics, just the usual replacement of […]

I was really lucky to be given one of these beauties. It a high end radio from the mid 1950s, with lots of SW bands, a front-end RF amplifier (most designs I’ve seen so far don’t use one) Push-Pull audio output valves, a magic eye tuning indicator and a big 10″ speaker. I’m going to take my time with this one, it’s a bit of a beast and I want to enjoy restoring it as much as I’ll enjoy using it. Like previous PYE designs, the chassis it quiet tidy, […]

This set arrived from a friend, it’s in quite good condition. On initial inspection things looked very clean. The usual method of testing an restoring the power supply. Cleaned up the chassis, downloaded the service manual and ordered some electrolytics for the power supply, these took quite a while to arrive. There must me a shortage of these 32uf-32uf components! Finally, after waiting a couple of weeks for the PSU capacitor to turn up, I was able to work through the set. I already had all the other capacitors in […]

This Philco is a small cheap table top radio. It’s very simple in design, has quite a low component count and actually works really well. The only down-side to it’s design is that it uses a dropper-resistor to step down mains voltage to power the heaters in the valves. This is really inefficient, of the 43 Watts consumed by the radio, about 30 is burned up in that resistor! I guess it doubles as a nice personal heater for those cold winter nights! The cabinet wasn’t too bad, just needed […]

Roberts Radio was a very successful manufacturer of portable radios in the UK. This RT1 was their first ever transistorised model, from 1958. I was fortunate to find this one on an auction site for small money but it needed a lot of love, missing strap, broken logo, terrible knobs, broken clasp and really really grubby leather. On the up side, the electronics seemed to look nice an clean, with only moderate damage to the aerial coil. These early transistor sets have quite rare and delicate components that can be […]

I was never really happy with the appearance of the 471, after spending only minimal time on the cabinet. So, the other day I decided to strip it down and do some work on it. The other things I want to do, re-wire the speaker connector and investigate why the volume output is so low. Update on this, I’ve managed to redo the speaker wiring and also found some small problems around the amplifier section (EL33 valve) I had substituted a 0.1uF cap in place of the old 0.2uF. Fixed […]