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To quote Colin Clive in the original Frankenstein " It's alive ! Alive!" She's up and running. Beautiful sound. At night the dial is filled in every spot with far away stations. Day time, all the locals come in. Just one weird glitch. Tuning from the bottom up every station comes in. Tuning from the top down, no stations at all, dead silence. When I get to the bottom (550) and tune back up again every station pops in. Whats up?
Keep one hand in your pocket
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Philament, the first thing I would do is check to see if the oscillator is running. Start at the top and tune down so you get no stations, stop around 1000kc or so. Now if the radio is dead, use another radio tuned to 1260. Rock the dial on the test radio to see if you can pick up the local oscillator of your 18.
Steve
M R Radios C M Tubes
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Steve,
Tried it. Nothing at all and the other radio is sitting right on the top of the philco.
Keep one hand in your pocket
(This post was last modified: 08-13-2012, 09:38 PM by
Philament.)
Posts: 1,402
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City: Linn Creek, MO
It's weird, but it sounds like the oscillator is dieing when you tune from the upper end down. You might try cleaning the wipers on the tuning condenser shaft. Maybe someone else will have an idea on this.
Steve
M R Radios C M Tubes
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City: At the beach left coast south end
Steve,
Thanx for the tip. I need to get some deoxit and I'll try it this weekend
Keep one hand in your pocket
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Steve Davis
Worked ! Thanx. It's nice to know that it functions as designed, but it really was sort of a non issue. I never tune across the dial. In my area of Southern California, the only signals in the air are incessant talk and music in Spanish. I can remember back to the last few years of NBC's Monitor Radio, "Your's Truly, Johnny Dollar" and some really good (to my 10 year old ears) science fiction shows. Now there is no more commercial Broadcasting, just Narrowcasting. So my AM radios play what I broadcast. Music from the 30's and 40's and Old Time shows. Kind of sad actually.
charlie
Keep one hand in your pocket
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At night, with a good antenna, you should be able to pick up several of the larger AM broadcast stations across the USA.
Also at night you should be able to pick up something on your shortwave band, even though it only goes up to 4.0 MHz.