Remembrances of vacuum tube days
As a young teenager, I developed a love for electronics which became a lifelong love affair. In those days vacuum tubes were the norm and solid state devices such as transistors weren't in usage then....
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nice thing about the AM tube radios is that the "all american 5" design (5 tubes for battery power, 6 with AC) covered probably 99% of the AM radios and all mfg were so similar once you understood how one worked, you knew how all worked, and could fix any of them.
today I have a philco portable, A Zenith transoceanic portable AM & SW (portable in that they run on batteries or AC power) and philco AC powered radio. All use the same tubes, basically the same design. Even the battery packs for the Zenith and philco are almost identical. With todays batteries they will run about 500-700 hours on a home made battery pack of 6 D cells and 60 AA's (Or 10 9V but those only last maybe 100 hours). And not needing a rectifier they come on almost instantly with the fast heaters on the filaments.
The earliest "farm" AM radios had the 1.5V filaments in parallel rather than series and ran on a 1.5V "A" battery, those 1.5V batteries bigger than a beer can and a "B" battery of 90V. about the size of a 6 pack.
Grandfather had a nice "farm radio" they didn't get electric power till the 50's and he kept it around for winter storm power outages.
A eventually went away and the AA, AAA, C, D replaced them, B disapeared need to make those from either 9V or AA's.
today I have a philco portable, A Zenith transoceanic portable AM & SW (portable in that they run on batteries or AC power) and philco AC powered radio. All use the same tubes, basically the same design. Even the battery packs for the Zenith and philco are almost identical. With todays batteries they will run about 500-700 hours on a home made battery pack of 6 D cells and 60 AA's (Or 10 9V but those only last maybe 100 hours). And not needing a rectifier they come on almost instantly with the fast heaters on the filaments.
The earliest "farm" AM radios had the 1.5V filaments in parallel rather than series and ran on a 1.5V "A" battery, those 1.5V batteries bigger than a beer can and a "B" battery of 90V. about the size of a 6 pack.
Grandfather had a nice "farm radio" they didn't get electric power till the 50's and he kept it around for winter storm power outages.
A eventually went away and the AA, AAA, C, D replaced them, B disapeared need to make those from either 9V or AA's.
