[Tubejunke]

The comments about what equates to becoming radio hoarders are certainly accurate, but I feel that we left a thing or two out for this gentleman. You need a fundamental understanding at least of electricity and electronics, and you must learn to beware that the stuff can kill you. Strongly worded, but I don't know any other way of driving the point home. It was taught to me long ago that 1 ampere of electrical current can stop a human heart. These days it is fractional or so many milliamperes meaning less current. I forget the exact number, but I stress safety. Get yourself an isolation transformer. All AA5 radios without a transformer power supply have one side of the AC line coming from your wall outlet connected to the chassis. If you touch the chassis or just happen to be holding the radio and your hand is on one of the hold down bolts you run a 50% chance of getting electrocuted depending on which way the radio is plugged in. I could go on, but this gives you a reason to get those electrical fundamentals under your belt before you start tearing into things and get too secure and get hurt.

An isolation transformer in layman's terms is just a small unit you can buy on Ebay or elsewhere for not a lot of money that you will plug into the wall outlet and then plug your radio into it. Being a transformer is between you and the house's electrical AC line, there will be no way for you to come into DIRECT contact with the line, so you are greatly protected. Do a little study on alternating and direct current along with transformers and induction. You will be dealing with capacitors a LOT, so there are some important points of knowledge that I consider critical there. Caps come in many forms in old radios. It will take a while to simply be able to identify everything you run into. START with understanding how to safely handle them. Especially larger value capacitors which are termed electrolytic. They are polarized and if you connect them backward there can be a small explosion. Not going to knock your house down, but you will be left shaking wondering what in the world you have done. This is getting long winded and could get longer; I'm not proud (Arlo Guthrie?!!?), so I will finalize by saying go online and find a resistor/capacitor color code chart that you can understand. There's a ton of them thanks to the WWW. It used to be a page in a book and is quite simple. I find them on the web that I can't understand, but you will need that to be able to identify components in order to take measurements and get replacement parts.

So welcome to the world of thermionic emission and, well; old radios (tube type). Hint hint.....