A member poll: do TV collectors find radios boring?
 

Got to thinking about this today.

I used to be a radio guy through and through...TVs were too complicated to bother with. Then, in the mid 1990s, I caught the TV bug and radios seemed very limited in scope and electronically uninteresting.

Now, don't get me wrong....I do love the few radios I have and am not bashing anyone who has a love for them. I'm just curious if, by and large, most TV collectors have much interest in the antique radio end of the hobby still?

Let's discuss :D

Yes. My interest began with tube audio equipment though, then I got
Into radios, and finally TV. I still like all three subjects. In the 90s i was really Into designing and building tube Hi-fi amplifiers, probably 90% of my ideas never actually got built but at the time I really enjoyed doing calculations and drawing schematics. My RCA tube manuals have a huge amount of wear from all those exercises!

I prefer to repair and use things versus collect though, although collecting ends up happening. Main problem with radios these days is our last good AM music station switched to FM only a couple years ago, and I don't really like talk radio or religious stations or sports radio.

I started with radios (I accumulated all sorts of things some accidentally some as passing fancies) as my first serious, continuous, lasting hobby and still like to collect and restore radios. Yeah, some do bore me....How many AA5s can you restore till you start to be able to smash a few and build a new one from the remains on memory of the schematic/start sleep-restoring them. :D But for every cookie cutter AA5 there is an AA5 with a cool enough cabinet to merit doing the trained-monkey-ready restore or a non-AA5 with some clever or unorthodox circuit that really feeds my inner tube-gear-nerd....Case in point I just restored a Silvertone model 1954 tombstone that uses a combination of Fat-pin tubes and WEIRD early metal shell octals, and as a cherry on top the volume control is a pair of coils that are mechanically moved in relation to each other to control the volume (I really need to see the schematic to sate my curiosity).

Radios did start to loose challenge and mystery to me, which is when I got into TVs, and those gave me all I could ask for and more for a while. I'm better and don't get as much challenge now, but TVs by nature make you keep using your head for repairs.

I'm starting to get to the point of scratch building things (like audio equipment) now. It used to be I lacked the math and understanding to make much of anything that worked or was useful, and preferred to fix equipment with good designs and tech info, but now that I can design from scratch that can be fun too (though sometimes frustrating).

I'm a restorer of complex or "first" or oddball things. With the
exception of something like a Sparton Blue Sled radio, I'm not
really into cabinets, though Art Deco is a big big plus in anything.

I really care to make something work as well as possible, and
compare them. I see no reason to have many sets with very similar
circuits.

Uh ... its on Nostalgiaair and it REALLY IS WEIRD

its also 175 kHz

I WANT ONE!

One way TV sets are more interesting is the fact that while so many radios had the same layout, coverage, and performance, for decades, TV was always evolving. I don't think that there was ever an "All-American Twelve" TV where so many sets were alike.

That being said, there's one branch of radios that I spend a lot of time with: Vacuum tube portables. I was unaware of their existence until I was about 20, and I was impressed with the tonality of many of them, along with the fact that they are less likely to have RF overload issues than many transistor radios I've used.

Being portable, I can carry them to where there is not too much RF noise and I can enjoy listening to the radio.

A Zenith H500 playing Brazilian country music makes for an interesting conversation piece on the beach.

The only radios I have are in console units that also contain televisions. I know a few other television collectors like myself that have zero interest in radios, but I think we may be in the minority.

I think Radio and TV are both historically interesting in their own right. What I find boring(on both technologies) are the mundane tasks of the restoration, like changing thousands of capacitors, or refinishing dozens of cabinets. What I really enjoy is studying the schematic and trouble shooting. So my collecting is done more so out of a curiosity of the technology than it is about amassing a large number of operational sets. I also enjoy seeing sets that other collectors are working on, which means one less set I need to drag home for my up close personal inspection.

I got my first antique radio in winter of 2013. It was a Philco 41-231, which I'm sure some of you will remember, I attempted to do a full recap but ended up doing way more damage. After that incident, I hated radios, and I hated the though of working on them, but I still wanted to experience the joy that the old Philco once brought me. So I set out on a quest to get as many antique radios as possible in efforts to get that joy back. But on August 27, 2014, I found a Philco 42-327, and it changed my life. I became fascinated with radios once again, and since then, I have learned an inconceivable amount of information, from going to the radio club and from you guys. Time went on, the Philco kept on playing, and I started finding more radios. By this time, they were pretty much coming out of the woodwork. Then, on July 20, 2015, my life changed again when we got cable TV. All I had was my 1989 Zenith 19", and I decided "I WANT a roundie console TV." Time went on, and I found no roundie, so I settled for my 1979 Quasar that I cleaned up. Then, on January 20 2016, I got my first console TV. And my story has to end there because supper is ready...

Not so much the Radios, but what's on the Radio that bores me.

Seems kinda arbitrary to let dinner end your collecting hobby... :D

I used to enjoy television before DTV. My forte is DX and with DTV DX is nearly useless. I swung back around to my old AM DX habit. With 15 stations running the same program, it's become much more difficult but there's still "gold to mine" just much, much harder!

You have one of those things as well!
The main reason, I bought it was the novel volume control circuit. Most of the tubes were missing and the cabinet is missing some veneer. I did get it going, but it needs restoring and Aligning. :scratch2:

LOL! As I was saying (I forgot to repost - instead I did convergence on my 1976 Zenith CCII) When I started getting into TV's for real around October last year, I became enamored by all the videos on Youtube. Most notably, Shango066 videos, and Drh4683 videos. I've seen 'em all. In that, I learned a wealth of knowledge which prepared me for my first ever tube TV (my avatar) that I got from my good friend Danny, whom I met back in December of 2015. At the present day, I'm eagerly awaiting my first Roundie, which is a 1963 Admiral Combination. Danny found it at an estate sale back in May.

I got it for $45 at the last WARCI meet. Mine is near perfect see pic, and has seemingly all it's original tubes*. Some of which are REAL odd early shouldered envelope metal types the likes of which I'd never seen before. I bought it because in the early years a console with the same dial (which I like the look of) slipped through my fingers, and this was a chance to have "the one that got away" in a nicer package.

*So when I found a P-K short in the 84 (proto 6X5) rectifier I got creative, and added diodes under chassis, cut the tips off the P and K pins and slipped spaghetti between the envelope through leads and the inside of the hollow pins...The heater is still connected, original tube in socket looking correct from topside, but no more pesky P-K short. :)

https://c5.staticflickr.com/9/8742/2...98df5ca7_n.jpgDSCN1992 by Tom Carlson, on Flickr

I clicked on the button for "love 'em equally" but that's not quite accurate. I started with old radios as a kid. And as you can see from my web-gallery in the link in my signature below, I like most anything electronic that makes noise: radios, TVs, phonographs, juke boxes and more. I have a collector sports car too.

But although I have a more-than-casual interest in all that, my primary thing is vintage television. I've been focused mainly on TV history and TV collecting after a friend gave me a set he found in his attic 30-some years ago.

Let's not forget...if it were not for radio, there would be no television!

As a kid I believe my first interest was antique radios, but when I first saw pics of early TV's I was blown-away. The thing was that back around 1980 early TV's, outside of collectors circles, were no where to be found, so I started collecting radios. When I finally located a local TV collector/dealer, I finally began to acquire them. I find they both have their charm. The edge antique radios have is the smaller size, less troublesome operation, and much, much more diverse and interesting cabinet styles.

True. If it wasn't for NPR...I'd never turn mine on... :sigh:

When I turn on one of my old radios or TV's I strictly use my AM transmitter or DVD player and have a choice of anything. I gave up on AM radio by the 1990's.

There is still good music and programing on AM to be found during night DXing...Some places there are good oldies AM stations you can get during the day too. I've got 1-2 such stations in my area.
NPR :puke: Classical music + talk with horrid left bias = hell no! I'll take oldies-80's pop/rock, or Rush or the local right talk hosts any day. Only good thing on NPR is the 30's-40's dramas they play on Sunday out here....Used to like Prairie Home Companion for some of the humor and stuff, but once the current POTUS got elected the next episode singing his praises permanently soured the show for me.

There's three AM stations in this area, that play music, one easy listening and two oldies stations. They're those 500 watters that cut their power down to 27 watts at night.
One's in Milwaukee, one in West Bend and one in Plymouth. :sigh:

Did you get in on the opportunity that the digital transition (with its near-abandonment of VHF-Lowband) provided for really long-haul analog TV DX by sporadic-E?

Since the transition, I've received television stations from Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and several Mexican states in Michigan by Es.

These places had always been "trying to come in" all along, but local lowband stations, and stateside stations in the "Es ring" about 1,000 miles around me were burying the DX.

With locals gone, the real DX can get through (though note that the Mexican analogs are gone).

Yes, there are lowband digitals in NE, but North Platte and Hastings will be in the side null of an antenna pointed south, and Superior is far enough away that an analog ch4 DX station could get through (certainly the audio if not the picture as well).

I started by enjoying .......as opposed to fixing .... record player, radio and a tv. Dad had a Philco 46-200 that introduced me to DXing AM. By age 11, I was getting "presents" of AA5s and began reducing some to parts and others started working by some miracle.

Our metal Motorola BW was buried in an upstairs closet when the '71 Zenith brought color to our den.

I would push the iron-rich Motorola down the hall to my room on top of a big Tonka truck for some early-morning cartoons, Hogan's Heros etc when the TV-Den was off limits. It was then that I HAD to address the antenna issues, which led to actually getting inside and fixing other issues.

I get sick of old radios, turn to tube receiver-amps and record players and get tired of that, then on to TV repairs and nostalgia-overload, which bring me back to the radios.....and so it goes.

I miss in the 1980's when the AM oldies station played big-band/vocalists here in NY, and occasionally old radio shows too. I find that having the opportunity to choose something great to broadcast myself is hard to resist.

It's rather annoying & disconcerting to have built up a reasonable collection of the finest Devices ever dreamed up for grabbing an obscure signal outta the ether, & realizing all you can listen to are some rabid individual raising hell about JAY-ZUS, a couple of somnolent drunks droning on & on & on about "The Game", 5711 commercials extolling the virtues of some Majick pill that makes yr Unca Willie nice & hard,or annoyingly too numerous THIS year, having to listen to a couple of braying jackazzes wanting ME to vote for one of 'em. Poor ol' Lou Coulliard- one of the wheels at Collins radio-Lou is likely spinning in his grave..

There's always shortwave! ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha-z25ipm_c

Amen!

I started with simple radios, then got interested in more complicated radios (boatanchors and higher-end consumer sets). Eventually, I moved on to TVs, and that's mainly what I collect and restore nowadays, unless I run across a radio that's irresistible for some reason.

BC programming around here has always been pretty ghastly. I used to listen to my boatanchors regularly (hear the BBC news at midnight!), but the "bigs" in English-language shortwave broadcasting have cut back to the extent that there's very little SW worth hearing any more. Late-night DX-ing ain't half as exciting in a world where you can dial up a zillion Internet stations -- foreign and domestic -- on your phone, with no static or fading. I listen to FM radio almost exclusively, and yes, I have a couple of AM transmitters, but most of the time I just turn on one of my old FM radios, which are located close at hand in places where I spend most of my time.

With tube TVs, I feel like can fix most sets most of the time, and get advice from forums if I get stuck. I still have plenty to learn, and there are enough different designs that I don't picture getting bored soon.

Just my $0.02.

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

The answer depends on the TV or radio we are talking about. In the last months I spent a lot of time restoring a prewar radio what means I had to restuff around 25 wax/tar caps, adding new connection leads seal the whole things again and so on. Of course this was much more dirty work than restoring an average 1950s TV set.
I consider to build in a 1954 FM after market tuner from the same manufacturer into the prewar radio. I connected the FM tuner for test reasons and it sounded surprisingly good :music:
What do you think about adding the FM tuner to keep the radio functional? Unfortunately AM is almost dead here in my region...

BTW: I own the radio which is in very nice technical and optical condition since more than 20 years and restored it accurately this year because of the large number of caps.

Greetings Josef

When I voted I went with more of a radio guy than a TV guy because that is my business. Truth is I like them both equally and prefer the high end radios and TV's for the challenge because fixing 2-3 hundred run of the mill radios a year can get a little boring.

Gregb

I like tvs and radios..any of them
 

What I did with my Philco 39-116 was attach a Kraco FM converter to the AM
terminal running on a 12 volt power supply...tune radio to 1440kc and..voila!
One FM radio coming up.Now I can listen to all the old-time radio shows on our
FM stations Saturday and Sunday nights..It does not harm the Philco in any way. no modifications to it of any kind..more than one way to get FM on an older radio, and it sounds great!:D:banana:

That's a clever set-up. I can't stress enough how worth it is to invest into a good AM transmitter though. I paid $200 at least 15 years ago for my transistor model and have used it almost daily ever since with no problems. I'm a big fan of old classic radio shows and there's nothing like enjoying them via the original equipment they were transmitted to!

For radios with a phono input, the options are more open/easier to find. My favorite is the Pilotuners they were made early post-WWII, can have excellent sensitivity and fidelity, switch automatically between phono pass thru and FM with the power switch, and a lot of people connected them to their pre-war radios so even if it is not the best match you have the excuse of "it was not uncommon for sets like this still in use post war to have one of these attached."

I've started hoarding 50's-60's tube mono HiFi FM tuners for the same purpose.

I remember those units, wish i had one for my 1968 torino... Factory AM radio doesnt have much these days.. :)

SR

I use a surplus "talking house" transmitter, getting the feed off of the interwebs. Still like radios, mostly the earlier stuff, 20's and 30's. Even like the 1 tube regen sets, they have amazing performance for so few parts.

I shoulda got one those. I ended up tying a Pilot T601 to the volume wiper of my Philco 42-380/390 to get FM.

I might still brew up an AM transmitter so I can send audio from my system to my radios. Kinda like I do with my Blonder-Tongue and old TVs :yes:

Vintage radio on two AM stations! I use my vintage Philco and enjoy how radio, and comedy/drama used to be DX. I look forward to running my '36 Philco (under construction) and getting my '40 Zenith (TV/Phono input) repaired. Here's to the majesty of the 6L6 and the 6V6!

I'd like to be able to dial in FM stations with the radio's original tuning capacitor. There is one converter of know of with this capability, offered by P.A.F. Electronics Italia.

I'm doing what I can to the big Pye radio at a slow pace as the previous owner doesn't care about it. I have the chassis stripped down and de-rusted, not much but it's a start. The power transformer checked good but the wiring is rotten so I'll have to trace that all the way back to the windings for replacement.

I started on radios back in the 1960s, followed by television, theatre-sound and broadcast gear, and ham radio. I guess that it's in my blood!

I do have a nice Part 15 AM station that is programmed with 1950s and 1960s oldies, when I want to listen to radio. Eventually I plan on doing the same thing with TV, using a Blonder Tongue modulator.