Quote:
Originally posted by Paula
Crooner, that is so cool!
Beautiful radio, too -- I'd like to have one similar to yours someday.
As you well know, one of the big drawbacks of restoring these old Broadcast Band radios is that there's hardly anything on the air that's worthy of them. I think that many others are going with setups similar to yours, to get the sounds that are appropriate to the vintage of the radio.
Here's a kit for an AM broadcaster I came across on a website just the other day. This guy offers the same unit assembled and tested, and also a cheaper kit. I wonder if these things work any better than the FM transmitters that I've tried in the past?  They probably do, since there's no stereo to worry about.
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Paula - The AM rebroadcaster idea is good (I used one of those as the transmitter for a small AM radio station I had from 1970 to '72 in my hometown), but I have another suggestion. How about those "big band" AM stations? I don't know where in Indiana you are, but most every big city has at least one; many such stations have wide coverage areas as well. Their music would be just perfect for listening to over any vintage radio. I keep my 1963-vintage Zenith K731 tuned to such a station in Cleveland (I live in a very small town some 35 miles from there) until the signal fades into the noise at night (it's only 5,000 watts; I swear they change their antenna signal pattern and cut their power after sundown, as I can't hear the station on any radio in my apartment except the 731 at night--that set is a DX machine if I ever saw one, even using the built-in "wavemagnet" AM antenna, getting stations up and down the East Coast and as far west as Texas and Colorado at night [after the sports station signs off for maintenance early Monday morning I often hear KOA in Denver on 850] from my location here in Ohio. This thing even brings in a 500-watt oldies station in a town about 20 miles west of here, even at night when the station cuts its power to 42 watts. Liking oldies as I do, I'm glad for that, although I can always tune in on the Internet [welw.com] as that station streams its audio over the Web).
BTW, the difference between AM and FM is the manner in which the carrier wave is modulated. AM is an abbreviation for amplitude modulation (the amplitude or level of the signal changes with audio modulation); FM is frequency modulation, where the actual frequency of the carrier changes by a certain small amount, plus or minus, with modulation. The amount of frequency swing is referred to as the deviation level.
A little about myself: I am 47 years old and an amateur radio operator, having been licensed over 30 years (got my first license in 1972 at the age of 16) and I've been an electronics bug most of my life (which actually led to my getting a ham radio license).
Had a basement full of old TVs and such back in the early '70s. Enjoyed the heck out of it while it lasted, but I moved to an apartment in late 1999 and had to scrap all those old sets.
However, I do have a small collection of small radios such as my Zenith K731, an older Zenith H511 (1951), and a bunch of '70s-vintage transistor radios of various makes, not to mention reading everything I can get my hands on concerning Zenith radio, TV and other entertainment gear (I like Zenith, as you can tell from my collection), so I am staying very close to a hobby I have enjoyed for many years.
I am rebuilding my tool kit as well (all I need now is a digital multimeter and a new soldering iron; I left most of my tools back at my former home--they are long gone by now) so I can keep my vintage gear working like new. I scored a 5" Zenith NOS (new old stock) speaker on ebay the other day, which I will use to replace the speaker in my H511 Zenith (the original has a cone torn pretty much beyond repair, although it still sounds surprisingly good, as does the radio for having been made over 50 years ago).
Good luck to you and, as many others before me have said, welcome to AK. Antique/vintage radio collecting is a wonderful hobby, but, as at least one other poster has noted here, it can be addicting as all get out. Where I used to live I would pick up old TVs from my neighbors' trash, which explains why my basement there was full of old ('50s-'60s vintage) televisions of every U. S. make except Magnavox. (How the devil did I miss that one?
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Now I'm into antique radios. . . . Where will it end?