My Grandpa's Old Radio: It's time I got her going

[bcmatt]

Well, I haven't tried making an antenna or anything yet, but with the caps and bias cells replaced, it sounds pretty clean with something feeding the rca input. I also cleaned up the outside with some guitar polish.

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Here's the inside with the new caps. I put one of the cans back in to plug the hole it left:

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These are the caps that were pulled:

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I made this quick rca stereo to mono summing adapter so that I can feed it from my pifi if I want to.

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I might see about making another cheap pifi so that this can go in a different room from the living-room stereo.
However, I would like to try out the whole antenna thing and see what I can discover on the different shortwave bands. I feel like my extended family would all like to see this actually working as a short-wave radio since that's how grandpa would have used it. I did feed it some classical web radio from Italy and filmed a quick video of it to please my folks.

But ya, I'll see what I can wrangle up for some long piece of wire to run an antenna around the yard.

[martin manning]

Great! You will want to align it at some point, which is a process that requires specialized equipment to make a good job of it. You can do it by ear and maybe get some improvement but more than likely it will be less than optimum.