1980 Realistic clock radio
 

While perhaps not as interesting as my 1973 GE digital clock radio I posted about a few years ago with the old style plug in vfd tubes, I picked this up as I was hoping to use the GE as a desk radio, and get another one for the bedroom. But this still uses a blue vfd display which I think is better looking than the red led ones. It also has stereo FM and displays the date as well as the time.

This initially had very little sound out of the left speaker. The problem turned out to be 2 bad electrolytic coupling capacitors. Having the schematic glued to the bottom so I didn't have to go looking for one was nice, but it was in such small print I needed to get out a magnifying glass in order to read the part numbers on it. The radio dial light was also out. It was an unusually shaped light, but I had one I believe was part of a kit to replace all the bulbs in a Marantz receiver that I had only used part of, that was nearly a perfect fit.

The hard part of repairing this was those two aluminum pieces on the sides. They just glue over the plastic case, but were pretty banged up on both sides. One side I managed to get back into shape easily, but I wound up needing to use a little bondo on the other. Then I still needed to paint both pieces silver, so they would look the same.

Looks like it turned out nice! I like it.

Wow what a classic.Looks great .Radio Shack was always great in supplying the schematic on the unit or in the owners manual back then.

I like those displays. I assume all units like that use a blue diffuser, not sure if the display itself is blue. That was the case with my malfunctioning model 229, which I still have the VFD from.

I've had it plugged in since last night, it's still keeping good time. I never tried to repair the clock part of one of these clock radios, so I don't really know too much about how these electronic clocks and displays work. I got interested in these electronic digital clock radios because the mechanical clocks always seem to make too much noise and keep me awake.

Here's a pic of my 73 GE which shows the vfd tubes. This is the only model clock radio I've seen that uses the actual tubes in the clock display. I'm surprised they never made a nixie clock radio, but I've never seen one.

Well, that's interesting. I wonder if nixies would swap in.

What's the model number of that one?

The display phosphor itself is a pale blue-green... some applications used a blue filter and some used a green filter to display the desired color. Here is a pix of the bare tube lit up.

http://bedzine.com/blog/wp-content/u...m-Clocks-1.jpg

jr