[Guest]

Hello everyone. Would like your opinions on this Philco 37-610 I found today in an antique shop. Seems to be untouched. Photo finish in great shape with some wear around the knobs and the radio sounds good. The top outer knob tunes but what does the inner knob do? Grill cloth looks original to me.
Anyhow, I got the guy down to $75.00 on this so I went ahead with it. Was this a good deal?

Note from site admin: Sorry, but the photo which was attached to this post is no longer available.

[Michael Dennis]

Looks like a nice radio. The inner knob is for vernier or slow, fine tuning. I like the dial on these radios especially.

Mike

[Doug Houston]

Cute as a bug's ear. With a little artistic touch-up, the thing will look like new. I've seen higher prices on those sets at auctions, so you didn't do bad.

[Guest]

Thanks for the comments. I also like this dial. The dial is a little worn and is hard to see the numbers. Appears to be three bands. AM and maybe two shortwave? An added plus was I turned it over and looked thru the slots in the bottom and many caps have already been replaced. Just saw a couple old paper caps. So I guess when this radio was purchased in 1937 the homeowner brought it home and had to hook up some type of antennae. THere are 4 screws on the back with the middle two as a ground. I get a couple stations loud and clear if I connect a long wire to terminal one and hold the other end. Without holding the reception is weak. So do you need the antennae wire and a ground? This is my first radio of the 30's so I could use a little help on how to get better reception...Thanks

[exray]

I get a couple stations loud and clear if I connect a long wire to terminal one and hold the other end.

Sounds like a VERY short antenna!

Relying on memory here so anyone else feel free to jump in if I'm wrong.

The normal setup for a single wire antenna would be with the jumper on terminals 2 and 3 and the wire antenna on Terminal 1... 4 is left vacant.

If you're using a twinlead feed the jumper goes from 3 to 4 and then 1 and 2 are your terminals for the feedline.

If your wire antenna is on the order of 75-100 feet it should work fine. Having to leave fingers in place often indicates it needs some alignment tweaking and might also be an indication if you're using a short antenna. A ground is nice to have but doesn't always make that big a difference, you may see the effects at one frequency but not at another.

Philco got a lot of mileage out of this same basic circuit in many models. Its a good performer.

[Guest]

Thanks, Exray. Yeah looks like my 12' of wire strung up was quite short if I need 75 to 100'. So what did people do back in the 30's for antenna? Terminals 2 and 3 already have a metal connector across and the screw for terminal one was halfway out so I would say it was used with a single wire. So would the solution be to build a loop antenna such as I've seen posted here in the forum? Will this help shortwave reception also? Thanks again for the help.

[exray]

Yeah, 12 ft isn't the best

Folks back in the 30s really did string out long wires outdoors for reception. You can get the strong ones with 12 feet dangling behind the set but thats a compromise.

If you can't put up a good outdoor antenna you could try the loop at least for an improvement on the Broadcast Band. Shortwave is a different can of worms. Loops by their nature are not very effective at SW frequencies compared to say a wire in the attic or along the eaves of the house if those are your only options.

[Guest]

Thanks again for the info. I did not know that. I will certianly experiment with it and see what happens.