Car radios with tubes & FM...
 

Did anyone saw car radios with tubes which had FM and portable radios with tubes which also had FM?:confused: :beatnik:

My '64 Jag 3.8S had a tube am/fm mono radio. I believe it was a Becker, or possibly a Blaupunkt. I forget. I got rid of it in '69.

That's an interesting question -- I can't think of a single example, offhand. It seems that the ascendancy of FM coincided with the decline of the vacuum tube, with minimal overlap.

Paula

Mark, was that a vibrator type radio or did it use an output transistor?

Yeeesssssss! Those kind of radios where manufactured.
Take a herefor a car radio

lohttp://www.radiomuseum.org/dsp_modell.cfm?model_id=21447

And here for portable radios

http://www.radiomuseum.org/dsp_modell.cfm?model_id=4023
http://www.radiomuseum.org/dsp_modell.cfm?model_id=4026
http://www.radiomuseum.org/dsp_modell.cfm?model_id=4021 ok

Dunno for sure. I never pulled it and I only had the beast for a little under a year. Uncle Sam called and the folks traded it in on a Rambler when I was in basic training and lapsed on my payments.

Hey, for insurance purposes it was registered in their names. I was making the payments, at least until I went into the service. The folks were kinda early tough love proponents. Being drafted and not getting paid for a few weeks didn't matter to them. ...never got my money back, either.

I think it used an OT since I never detected any vibrations from it like I had on all my older cars (which I owned later) that had vibrator radios. I could hear that sucka in there.

A few weeks ago I bought a Motorola under-dash FM convertor and was surprised to find it uses tubes. I haven't dug into it yet. The seller said it works, so we'll see.

In a 1961 Chrysler I had was a tube AM/FM radio. Don't recall exactly but it may have been a hybrid.

Sorry to bring up a dead topic, but I'm pretty sure that Chrysler didn't offer any FM radios until 1964, and that was on Imperial models.... Chrysler models would usually get stuff a year or two later.

My 1961 Imperial has an AM tube radio. Never been opened up. Still works (with hum) :D

Well, I think I saw a tube car radio with FM at a "GAZ M21 Volga" Soviet car, but the owner dind't know if the radio was with tubes.
I found also a car radio with tubes for sale, but it was Soviet, so it worked on FM 64,5-73 MHz.

That is unfortunate I thought it was pretty cool.

One of the neighbors near my camp in the woods has a 69 Mercedes with an AM/FM tube radio. He says it's not working and wants to have it fixed. I considered looking at it, but, I'm kinda afraid to find a Mercedes car radio to be somewhat involved. I'm not sure what it would take to get the radio out of the dash of a Mercedes, but doing so might be a job in itself!

I might look into it... perhaps it just needs a tube replaced. Actually, I'm kinda surprised that Mercedes wasn't using solid state radios in 1969.

Untill about the '80's the sound provided by the transitors wasn't so good as that provide by the tubes. I found a "Blaupunkt" radio at a guy who haves a "Mercedes" but is only LW-MW-SW, not FM.