Well the video does have some turning in it and may well spark a smile from those here who have messed about a bit with old-timey radio tubes. I still remember when all the grocery stores had a small machine in the corner somewhere where customers could test and buy tubes for their tvs and radios.
The first computer I ever worked on had a tube tester built in :-).
Hi Kevin, thanks for the memories. Those emission testers did little more than help sell vacuum tubes. Old Timey huh? I bet there's one or two old old timers here who remember moving a cat whisker around a piece of galena crystal to get the best reception from KDKA or WLW.
Sorry rcw, we didn't even turn the bakelite knobs on those old crystal sets.
Turn to Safety, Arch Fortiter
WJR in Detroit. Then I got a real diode and I was in fat city. Listened to the first Liston/Clay fight under my covers after bedtime.
-- Doug
Try a foxhole radio. A razor blade, lead from pencil, and headphones (and of course, a long wire antenna and ground.). Not very selective, but way back when, few had more than one strong station to choose from. If you were rich (comparatively, for a kid) you could spring for a cat's whisker and wind your own tuning coil. If you were really well off, you bought a 365pf variable tuning cap as well. As a child I worked in a television shop to pay the mortgage. I got $3, they got the other $23. 4 repairs would pay their mortgage for the month. This was at the cusp of tubes vs. semiconductors. By 10, I was climbing on roofs around Atlanta installing TV antennas for round tube CRT color televisions and doing the bulk of repairs.
The tube testers were marketing tools used to sell tubes - and for the most part, utterly useless. Fortunately, semiconductors had become the norm by my teens, although there were holdouts who still owned TVs with vacuum tubes. The transistor put many a diddling moron out of the TV business. Built my first computer from plans in a magazine in high school, but there were no O.S.'s to speak of - unless you wrote your own in the native CPU machine code. Made $13 an hour in 1980 and bought a house whose mortgage was $198. In 1988 IBM payed the insulting sum of $7.50 an hour until they tossed my office in the street because I sued some politically connected dirtbag lawyer. Then everything was shipped overseas for manufacture, is now assembled by machines, and nothing is repairable. Your average mortgage is now $700+, most jobs pay less than 20 years ago, and 32 different pink-handed money-changers have their hands in your back pocket. For the first time in history, the father had it WAY easier than the son. What a country, an era, cursed by being born into.
Greg G.
"Wonderful WOWO" or for real dx, WWL. Sometimes I turn the car radio to AM at night just to hear the fade, static and crosstalk.
Remember the Zenith Transoceanic receiver? Tubes, A & B batteries, stinky leather case.
When a big solar flare or EM pulse knocks this modern stuff offline permanently, you may find this knowledge useful. And damned the government to hell for de-allocating the VHF spectrum and NTSC to cell-phones. National security my ass.
Greg G.
Used to be on my list of 'must buy' stuff that I never had the money for when I was a kid. Got the MG and the Shopsmith and then decided the Zenith would just be too much trouble. Still would like to see if the new Grundigs live up to the quality of the old sets.
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