This radio is made by Shirasuna Denki or later on Shin-Shirasuna as noted on the label inside. The name "Silver" on one of the IF cans is a trade name of Shin Shirasuna. Shin Shirasuna built a lot of stereo gear for Harman/Kardon in the 70's and 80's and many radios under the Wards Airline brand.
Excellent, underrated Japanese brand. Even as late as the 1980's they were producing consistently good quality inexpensive radios with surprisingly nice features. My teenage years radio was a Silver XF-1900 multi band with 9 bands and digital frequency display, a great feature at the price point it sold for. Cheers!
hi shango, the rotary switch is a power saver. in EAR the output tube is disabled and the earphone connects to the 1U5. In LOW only half of the 3S4 filament is used to conserve power, in HIGH all filaments are used, which of course runs the A battery down in a short time. These radios were really only practical when used with the earphone. I have several sets very much like the one you have here. They are quite unique, that's for sure!
After 35+ years in the hobby, one thing I've learned is that sometimes you have to settle for 'good enough'. It's not like we can run down to the local parts house and find an exact replacement for things like failed coils, sometimes we have to improvise. I feel like this one is good enough
Hi shango. Im a transistor radio guy,but ive collected a few tube portables over the years. Never heard one play until now. Its a continental 4tube acdc. No powercord so made up battery pak of 7 9volts,with one weak one for around 69volts total. Had one bad tube a friend af mine tested.was the audio output, a 3s4. Got one from ebay. Works great!😊
Let's all press play a 2nd time when we leave the house or whatever for this man's videos.. nobody knows you're out. Get those view numbers up we get more wonderful content!
I love those old 'portable' tube radios! After eating up dozens of batteries, I built a power supply to keep from spending all my allowance on new batteries, I could listen to the old tube sets I salvaged from the trash in the late 60s and early 70s. And when the transistor sets became available, the batteries lasted longer, or so it seemed if I remembered to turn them off, I could carry them around and listen to them. But when I started driving, portable radios became less important, and car audio took its place! Today, unfortunately, old tube sets are not as easy to find and fix, but the transistor radios, and the last one I repaired was a Zenith Transoceanic 3000, are still available.
I'm happy to hear that you're helping out a young collector. As an electronics enthusiast, I remember how valuable were the conversations with experienced techs or engineers for me. Fast forward a few years, I'm an electronics engineer working in the semiconductors industry.
I hate working on battery portables . So fragile and critical . They always take me much longer than the mains sets . I don't have as much patience as you !!! Fascinating video .
I feel like such a fool that I didn’t know you were on Rumble. Now I’m feeling foolish for not understanding the Crusebot reference. Will have to go back through your uploads and hopefully there will be some rumble only content someday so we can all get away from the YT overlords. Love your content keep up the great work.
The wires cross inside the connector as a strain relief. It does make you double check. Edit; you discovered it.. premature comment story of my life. Enjoy your work very much.
2:20 The radio was manufactured by Shin Shirasuna Denki Co., which typically sold its radios (both tube and transistors) under the brand name Silver (not to be confused with Silvertone). 11:34 You can see the name Silver stamped on the first IF can.
I recently lost my "this is a test" station. Mine was on 530, a 6 watt travel information station (TIS) that aired info for a stretch of highway that is used for pavement testing. Located some 30 miles away from me. It went off on the first of this year and I haven't seen it since. The FCC license still shows active.
I always laugh when Shango utters the phrase, "...no way I'm gonna be able to .." and in the next cut he is engaged in the very action he just declared impossible. I did notice your posts on Rumble a while back.
The 6-dot capacitor code works as follows. Reading left to right in the direction of the arrow, the meanings of the top row of dots are: type, 1st digit, 2nd digit. The meanings of the bottom row of dots reading left to right are: characteristic or class, tolerance, multiplier. I have tried to include a link to a handy table of these parameters but, it appears that my comments are deleted immediately if my comment contains a web address. If you want to see the table, please let me know how to communicate the web address.
It was looking grim for a bit and I thought maybe this one wasn't going to make it. Then I checked the run time on the video and sure enough there was enough time and it got to see daylight once again. Nice troubleshooting.
The air-cored osc coil was very likely connected with the wrong phase, and that's why it did not work. Reversing one of the winding connections would have fixed the problem. About the the "high" and "low" power switch settings: in the "low" position only one half of the 3S4 filament is used, lowering battery consumption at the expense of some output power; in the "high" position both halves are used. The "ear" position totally disconnects the 3S4 filament, with the earphone being connected to the 1S5 plate.
Learned something NEW today. I have several RCA tube books, like the RC-30, but I only open them up to look at specific tubes... Then you showed the radio schematic near the back of the book??? So I grabbed my RC-18 older tube manual and their it was, same schematic as you were showing... Thanks for another interesting tip... BUT!!! I still do not wear rubber gloves on my hands!!! 🙂
Dan has explained in the past that he wears gloves because many of the TV's, radios, etc., that he works on often comes from storage areas, including the trash, and often contains rat feces and other undesirable substances. So, to protect himself against germs and potential sickness and/or disease, he chooses to wear gloves.
I had the same problem with Rumble, they pulled over a bunch of videos but then that got stopped. I had somebody at Rumble helping me migrate videos over there, they said they were putting me on a priority list blah blah blah but you don't get hardly any views over there is the main issue. Rumble doesn't suggest videos to anybody so if they don't know you're there, they never find any of your stuff! Great video as always, Shango, I always wondered if those oscillators could be replaced....
Strange it would be made to look like the red and black wires are on the opposite sides. If I'm not looking at it wrong. I would have connected the + on the side with the red wire showing, and the opposite for negative. Good thing you went with your knowledge. Very interesting radio. I like the name of it. It was somebody's pal.
TEN branded tubes and radios were made in Kobe at the Kawanishi Machinery factory by what was originally the Kawanishi Machinery company. Like many companies of the time Kawanishi supplied aircraft parts and similar for the military, releasing the TEN tubes in the mid 40s.. the company had grown quite diverse and split its various operations into several individual companies by the late 40s. The new name for the company that built the tubes was called Kobe Construction (if I remember correctly) which was later acquired by Fujitsu and rebranded Fujitsu TEN up until quite recently when they were bought out by Denso so the company now goes by Denso TEN. Still going to this day under the Denso brand but long stopped manufacturing vacuum tubes.
Shano066, I found a couple of radios yesterday for my channel, and I guess I stepped into the Twilight Zone because one of those radios was this one.Not trying to copy you.
Shango I really like your Solid state Tube idea. I have a thought you could add a Orange LED for the tubes you can see the filament glow . but for the space charge tubes u could add a IR led and you would see it in your camera. Very cool Idea. I just got a 4A-1B 'Starlet' Radio Garod Radio Corp. 4 tube and the b+ works on 67.5 volts. to restore. thank you for the tips.
The Tiny SA spectrum analyser/signal generator is proving to be very useful.. Wonder what the date is for the radio.. Presumably around 1954 to 56,just before the transistor era kicked in.
good that you've said about checking coils and not assuming recapping will cure everything, many say 'first thing is to recap, no, i've always said check all major 'unobtanium' parts before even thinking of recapping, or you'll just be wasting time and money..,
I was just looking at an online tank circuit calculator. If the oscillator half of the tuning condenser (while fully closed) measures 200 pf, it looks like the coil would have to be right at about 140 micro henrys. That is figuring 995 as the target frequency. (540 for the lowest AM station + 455 because the oscillator rides higher.) Please check out that online tank circuit calculator if you have time. It's quite interesting. Thanks for another cool video!
Could you chemically dissolve the coating off what's left of the broken oscillator coil lead so that it could be soldered back into place? Doing this with a solvent would prevent damaging the wire any further and might enable a successful repair using the original oscillator coil.
One of those red core IF cans from a transistor radio (the osc coil) might actually work in that radio, the tuning caps might be almost the same values in a typical transistor radio and that set. Putting a .01 uf cap between the hot end of the osci coil and the tuning cap will allow the circuit to work but keep B+ off the variable cap.
The brown plastic domino cap is 5000pF ( .005uF) if that is a green dot ( 5) then black ( 0) then red (x100) i.e. 50 x1000. That is a +/-10% tolerance plastic covered paper ( white left dot) cap. It is crap now like the coil. Owner should get a good replacement coil with an iron core. At least you have a source for the schematic.Thanks for the resurrection Shango.
Awesome fix! You can try making an Osc coil by making up a sewing machine bobbin with (or a phenolic tube spun on a drill bit), let’s say, 2 windings of #30 awg wire .. number of turns/ uH and dc resistance, is trial and error .. prob how RCA did it.
Fujitsu Ten was indeed an OEM for Toyota, as an example, they made single digit percent of Toyota ECU's, with of course 98%+ being made by Toyota's own NipponDenso
If you know the approximate frequency the oscillator should run at and you know the capacitor value, 1/6.28*(square root)[L*C] = frequency. You can solve for what the coil should be and use and find one that has the right value. You probably know that but FYI
Try turpentine or gasoline (on a Q-tip) to dissolve the shellac. It shouldn’t do anything to the coil form, but it might do something to the enameled wire, though I doubt it. Maybe the heat of a soldering iron will just melt the shellac off the end of the wire. 🤔 Sad, I like those little battery-powered tube radios, but good luck finding a replacement oscillator coil that small. 😢 I guess you might be able to wire in one from an AA5 set just to test the local oscillator.
The tuning capacitor maximum pf range is different, for different AM radios, so chances of substituting an oscillator from another radio will be ether too low or too high in frequency to headerdine properly to 455 khz IF.
"The Ten in the company's name does not refer to the number 10, but rather comes from the Chinese character Ten (天), meaning heaven in Chinese and Japanese."
Very well done Sir! I think that I might have tried putting a bit of Ferrite into the big Oscillator Coil to tune it down a bit. I wonder how much listening you got with these Radios per set of Batteries?
these pimply kid radios were often pink or green. they ate filament batteries in about an hour and a half in the days of carbon batteries. The tubes are plenty rugged. Perfectly good radios but impractical as portables with the carbon-zinc batteries... with alkalines they would run for a day maybe. the 45 v batteries lasted pretty well. But these things were expensive to run.. despite being cheap to buy.
Be sure the young guy understands phasing of an osc coil. There's 50/50 chance he'll hafta flip polarity of either winding. Also B+ on the tuning cap stator = BAAAAD if the plates were to short even momentarily.
One thing that you could've done to slow the oscillator down was to put another capacitor across the coil (where c4 and c5 are) and that would help slow the oscillator down. C4 and C5 across the T1 coil forms whats called a "tank circuit" and the frequency can be calculated using "f = 1/(2*pi*SQRT(L * C))".
Maybe the first replacement coil would work with reversed wires on one side. There are more ways how to built oscilator, but you always need positive feedback loop.
Apart from the simplicity of manufacturing, I don't get why do we still stick to color coding resistors. In USSR (МЛТ resistors), Poland (Telpod,Omig), East Germany (RFT) there were plenty of resistors which just had the value written on it. Even the small 1/8W МЛТ resistors had a value just written on them. Color fading or just plain weak/inconclusive straight from the factory is why I hate color coding.
I would like to get one of those Tiny SA spectrum analyzer/ signal generator but there are so many copies now I'm afraid to order a dud. Do you know a good souce please? I live in Asia and would likely order it from China. Thanks.
“Don’t be throwing no shade, I just want to get paid.” ROTFL 🤣 Haven’t heard that one before. I’m sure someone (me) will come up with, “never mind her boobs, I just want my tubes.” 😂 End moment of shameless self-promotion; back to our regularly scheduled program.
It was NOT uncommon to see wrong colors on early JA radios. Once in the early 70's I ordered 25 9 V connectors & they were reversed ! Always confirm ! LFOD !
golly... we got DESCRIPTIVE by identifying that plugs are male and jacks are female because it was easy to think. Now we gotta worry about offending a male who cut off his junk... sheesh! back 100 years and broadcast radio was enormously king. It was dominated by major networks who produced remarkable programs and were staffed by legit news departments. Like indoor plumbing and electricity and ma bell, radio was a necessity because it connected us with the 'outside' world. But then came TV who not only had audio but video too. The new giant TV put radio in 2nd place. Radio used to be REALLY COOL. TV used to be really cool too. Now it's the cell phone... EVERYBODY HAS THEIR OWN.
the radio & all broadcast news especially are monopolies who serve the 'deep state' now is the problem, plus 'everyone' is on one form of 'substance' or another, legal or otherwise & taught; 'not to think for themselves', or at all. Scarey