Show us your vintage pocket transistor radios!

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by superdeez

Here's another neat radio--a bike light!

No idea when it was made (I figure late 60s?), but it's a bike light, "siren", horn, and AM radio. My grandpa found it on an abandoned bike in one of his rental homes.

The bike was junk but this little guy worked great. I snapped it onto the handlebar of my bike, and used it for entertainment/light, and even for the horn if a person was on the sidewalk. If it rained, I kept a ziplock bag and I'd put it over it with a rubber band to keep it dry. If I had to lock the bike outside (which I avoided) I'd unsnap this light and take it with me.

Fired it up for the first time in a couple years, amazingly the batteries I left in it (oops) still had good juice. The radio still works--somewhat, the volume control is iffy and it falls in and out of place, causing sound to cut in and out. I stopped using it because I got a driver's license and stopped riding my bike, and because the light developed a short through the speaker and cuts in and out after the bulb warms up. I don't remember which happened first. I might try to put it to some type of use this hurricane season.

These little radios were very popular during the '60s and '70s. Radio Shack carried one for years that had a radio, light (I think) and an electronic horn activated by a little push button on the front panel. They may still carry an updated version today.

It's interesting to me that your radio's headlight somehow short-circuited through the radio speaker. I can think of only a couple of ways this can happen (perhaps others here can shed more light [pardon the pun] on it)--one of the lead wires from the lamp socket to the battery could be shorting against the metal frame of the speaker, or the loudspeaker itself could have some oddball short through the voice coil, causing the speaker to short to the frame. Since the sound intermittently cuts in and out when the bulb gets hot, it could even be some odd short in the lamp circuit itself that intermittently shorts out the speaker by way of shorting out the voice coil.

I wouldn't use the radio too long in this condition, as the short will cause the entire unit to draw much more current than normal; a new battery may not last more than an hour or so, if that long. I once had a multiband portable radio that drew so much current it kept blowing the fuse in an external power supply I was using to test it; I never used it with batteries, and it's probably just as well, as the thing probably had a shorted or leaky transistor creating a huge power-hogging short. The set sounded good at first, but the tone worsened as the radio drew more and more current from the supply until the fuse blew.

I would try a shot of Deoxit or standard contact cleaner in the volume control pot as a first step towards curing your radio's intermittent volume problem. A radio which has been sitting, unused, on an abandoned bike for who knows how long may be full of dust and dirt, both on the outside of the casing, inside the box, and on the PC board containing the radio (I would be amazed if I found a radio like this, even of 1960s vintage, with a metal chassis; these things were made to sell cheaply, so the radio is almost certainly all on a PCB). The volume pot may be and probably is extremely dirty, which would cause scratchy and/or intermittent audio.