For Auction: train stuff

I'm talking about the 1950s and early 1960s. The BBC have reallocated their frequencies/wavelengths several times since then.

In message , John Turner writes

You are probably right.

As I recall, 16 rpm was for records from Linguaphone courses and the like. I suppose the foreign phrases had to be spoken slowly to make sure you understood them ,and it must have helped if the record also went slowly at the same time!

Cheers, Steve

In 1966, I picked up, 208m (Bong) "Radio Luxembourg, your station of the stars" just off the coast on Newfoundland on a small transistor radio. :-)

-- Cheers Roger T.

Home of the Great Eastern Railway

So you will probably be surprised to learn that thermionic tubes/valves are being made to supply the top end of the hi-fi market.

Ken.

Ken Parkes wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@NOSPAMrosecott.ukfsn.org:

What made me laugh was when the pilot of a Mig25 defected and took his plane with him on a flying tour of Japan back in the 70s. Various folks laughed when is was discovered that the radios and radar within the aicraft were valve based and not transistorised.

Several years later they (or should I say "we" in the west) found that valves were far more resistant to EMP than little slivers of sillicone. ;-)

I think you may be having memory problem. It was around 500mts in the Midlands and 203mts everywhere else for the Third in the early days.

Ken.

lol - something like that...... similar to our bandwidth issues - spoken word presentations were not usually needed for their great audio attributes but their info. so slowly does it, was ok to still get the message clearly across and afforded a lot of additional recording time on a single disc.

FYI - DVD is going through the same thing now, except they are putting more real estate on the same sized disc. Up to around 100Gig I believe so far, where a standard DVD max's out at 9Gig.

Steve

Our home radio was an ex-Government surplus R1155 so I got to know everything in Kc/s - kilocycles :-) Third was just over

600kc/s, Scottish Home Service was just over 900 Kc/s and Light was somewhere around 1200 - 1300 Kc/s. Droitwich was 200 Kc/s.

Jim.

Our's was labeled in German as we lived on a British Army base. Shortwave was "KW" VHF was "UKW" or Ultra Short Wave Teifen was treble. Hohen was bass. The dial which revolved the internal ferrite aerial was a very long word I don't remember. A circuit diagram was taped to the inside of the cabinet which came in handy many years later when I took it apart to see how it worked.

(kim)

You can use modern solid state innards of course, although gearing the dial is tricky. I was a radio officer at sea for many years, working often right at the cutting edge of obsolescence (magneto striction resonators, ah me)

- We had a lot of old kit that remained in use up to the mid 1980s when rules on frequency drift changed. The Dwarka pilgrim ship that ran up the Gulf (used for the film Ghandi) had a receiver with three holes in the front panel so you could see if the elements in the valves were lit. After WW2 there were lots of old military bits about, the standard battery change over switch Marconi used was formerly the bomb bay door control knob for the Wellington bomber. Mate of mine has a collection of truly ancient telephones into which he is fitting modern innards so they can be used with tone dial only exchanges and the like. Not sure why exactly, they look interesting but the only one that is useful is an old thing with a support on the handset to jam it on your shoulder. The candlestic types are NBG if you have to write anything down.

Regards

Mike

I think I've seen him on TV?. They're hugely popular.

(kim)

they look bloody nice though

:)

I heard of someone here in Australia who was putting a converter inline so all you did was use the dial and it converted the pulses into tones.

funky idea

Steve

Not as easy as you might think. The original speakers were high impedance and transformer-coupled. Modern output stages are low impedance and direct-coupled. Our radio had separate speakers for treble and bass (16 and

32 ohm I think) coupled via an elaborate arrangement of twin transfromers each of which was custom wound.

And if anyone is thinking of replacing the speaker, I once measured 240 volts AC from the screws holding the speaker in place on an old Sobell. The neutral wire had become detached so the live was looking for the shortest route to earth which in this case was the screws holding the speaker in place and anyone unfortunate enough to touch one of them.

(kim)

Not on TV AFAIK although there is a chap in Sale (south of Manchester) who I think still refurbishes old car radios that Ian used to drop in to chat with.

I used to listen to Dan Dare faithfully, and sent away for some of the offers, but I felt the Ovaltineys were too juvenile for a 10-year-old!

How did Ian manage to chat to those old car radios? :-)

The message from MartinS contains these words:

Thank you for that True Confession, Martin. It's good to know that I am not alone. Now: did you try to persuade your Dad to write off the the bloke in K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M to help him to win the pools?

Horace Bachelor? Nah.

I remember Herbert W. Armstrong on "The World Tomorrow".