nice radios from friends
 

Some friends in our town caught wind of my interest in vintage electronics and offered me a couple of "old radios". I collected them last week. I was most grateful. I've never seen the likes of the Stromberg-Carlson.

The tan leather T/O is especially nice...

Wow, a SC and a TO, and both in just "please wash my face" condition! On the outside, anyway. I'll bet they play even though they would like to have new caps, etc.

Still TBD. The S-C is missing two knobs and a foot, but it sure is pretty othewise. It's got a barometer, thermometer and %RH meter built into it! I've never seen anything like it.

You can be quite sure that both of your radios were made in or before 1963, because of the Conelrad icons on the dials at 640 and 1240 kHz (kc when these sets were new). Conelrad was an emergency broadcast network that was started in 1953. Many vintage radios had the CD icons on the AM radio dials well into the 1970s, even though Conelrad was replaced by the Emergency Broadcast System in 1964 or thereabouts. I remember television stations in Cleveland still running EBS tests with the old Conelrad logo as late as the seventies, complete with the warning tone, the interruptions of the audio and video carriers, and so forth; in fact, one such test, in 1963, just about scared me out of my wits--I'll never forget it. I was seven years old at the time, and was watching some show on our 1955 Crosley Super "V" 21" TV. The program broke for a commercial or station break, then suddenly I saw this big Conelrad symbol on the screen. I ran down the long hall, screaming, from the living room in our house to the back bedroom; I was sure the Russians were going to blow us all off the map any second! :eek: :yikes:


The weather instruments below the dial on your Stromberg-Carlson radio are indeed unique. I had never seen any radio myself with such instrumentation built in until I saw this one. I cannot help thinking, however, that it must have been an annoyance to have to reset the barometer every time the radio was moved (even from one room to another), let alone from inside to outside the house or vice versa. My best guess is that most people who had these radios never even bothered calibrating the barometer; in fact, most probably didn't pay much attention to it or the other gauges anyway.

That leather T/O 600 is relatively rare, much more so than the usual "black duck" 600s.

DO NOT power this up on AC without checking the circuit for leaks (particularly in the electrolytic caps). It uses a 50A1 current regulator tube that is quite rare, and will be destroyed if too much current is run through it.

If you should find that the 50A1 is already toast, you can save the radio by adding resistance in place of the 50A1, and stabilizing the filament string voltage with a zener diode.

Nice TO I have one of the plain jane black ones, works great. Check and see if you have the 1L6 converter tube, if you do then your are double lucky. A
1R5 is often subed, and will work on the lower bands, but not the higher bands. I have been told it will not be as sensitive either. If you need a 1L6 they come up once in a while on ebay and some tube suppliers may have one, but they are not cheap, I think they go for around 30-40$.

I restored a black 600 for a friend a couple of years ago. It had been his father's and sat in a closet on a shelf for most of its life. It was a beauty. I recapped it, put in a silicon diode and extra resistance ILO the selenium (which I left in place,) and generally cleaned it up. It had the 1L6 and played like a champ. BTW if you're missing a 1L6, an alternate to buying a new one is to use an equivalent tube/adapter offered by Bill Turner at

http://www.dialcover.com/tubes.html

One note about these sets: with the set turned on when operating on AC, never pull out a tube and then reinsert it. The filter caps will build up a charge and can burn out filament(s) on reinsertion.

I have the 1LA6 adapter in one of my radios myself.

I'm basically satisfied with it. It works fine on AM, 2-4 and 4-8 with no problems. On 31m, 25m and 19m, I had to tweak the coil settings for best gain and dial calibration, and on 16m, I had to settle for a dial that I could adjust to be 200 kHz off (which I could get used to easily).

I suspect the larger tube, the metal base, and the adapter add some interelectrode capacitance.