Japanese Tube Radio

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Charlie

I have another Japanese radio that I forgot I had. The brand is National and it's an AM/SW receiver with dual speakers, a colorful face with blue and red numbers and a clear blue dial, and even a tuning eye! There is also inputs for a phonograph. All the righting on the back is in Japanese. The radio works pretty good, although the volume control needs a little spray in it. IIRC, i never did anything to it other than clean it up. Someone in the past made a repair to the bottom of the cabinet using epoxy... aparently there was a crack in it.

The tuning eye is a 12ZE8. I havent' found this number anywhere, and no substitutes. I'd like to get a fresh one as this one is very weak. If someone comes across a listing for this tube, please let me know.

The rest of the tube line-up is 12be6,12ba6,12av6, 30a5, and 19a3.

The front of the dial glass says Wide Sonic All Wave. Wow doesn't that sound fancy!

Sorry, the photo is a little fuzzy due to camera malfunction... damn piece of crap!

That picture isn't bad, Charlie--not from where I sit, anyhow. Looks pretty darn good, as a matter of fact.

Looks to me as if the Japanese were a few years ahead of us when they expanded their AM band to 1650 KHz, as the dial on your set shows, though the FCC went a bit further with the expansion of the U. S. broadcast band (to 1710) when that took effect some years ago. Perhaps, by now, the Japanese AM band has been expanded to at least 1710 KHz as well, if not more.

As to the slogan on your set's dial scale, that was very common in the '60s. Many radios, particularly imported transistor sets, showed fancy high-tech sounding names on their front panels 40 years ago. I once had a 2-transistor radio with the name "Coronet" engraved in fancy script lettering on the front and a crown emblem with a small hole in the center, to show the dial scale as it was engraved on the tuning knob. This radio also had a volume control with a similar scale arrangement to show sound level (and a small red dot at the off position of the switch).

Cute as all get out, but these sets didn't work well, or in some cases at all, unless you were very close to your area's local stations--in fact, these things were lucky if they picked up one station, let alone two or more. IIRC, on a good day, mine didn't get more than one local station about five miles from where I used to live, and wouldn't do much better in the small town I live in today, as the AM radio signals (except the local station in the next town, which only relays [simulcasts] a classical station 50 miles west of here these days) are rather weak out here.

BTW, I often wonder why those little 2-transistor sets had speakers; as I said above, they wouldn't work worth a plugged nickel unless you were close to at least one powerful station. These things may have produced enough volume for earphone listening (and probably did, with a strong local station), but how they could drive a speaker with only 2 transistors is way beyond me.