Shango, this lower FM band is following the OIRT standard, used by the USSR and its allies. If I remember correctly Bulgaria stopped using this band in 2005. You can modify these to receive the normal FM band. There are also Sokol 308s with a factory-made normal FM. There should be a table on the schematic somewhere with component values for the 88-108 FM band. I think I caught a glimpse of it on one of your schematics. Change out those components, do an alignment and you're in the game. For the sensitivity - Russia is a BIG country, so these were originally designed to give satisfactory operation even in the middle of the tundra, hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest stations. As a Bulgarian I can concur that these radios are EVERYWHERE. Apparently they were very popular and quite cheap. I have 4 right now, with one new-in-box. EDIT: the replacement cap in the second radio is Bulgarian. Also on the second radio someone has already done some kind of quick and dirty FM conversion. This was very popular thing to do with old Russian radios in Bulgaria, when they switched off all the transmitters on the 66-73 MHz band. I should know - I've done it myself a few times, with varying degrees of success.
So what is the meter conversion on MW to KC, KHz? I found the same looking one on Ebay, but it says ST, KT, UKT for the bands. UKT looks like FM and it has the 88-108 dial. Also the one that lists the cities like Novi Sad and Skopje can be picked up on AM, but in the US, only gets the local stations.
I'm also Bulgarian and I get 3-4 stations in the Sofia region with Vef Sigma 206 and Resprom Lira 68 on the 66-73MHz band and they are different than the stations on the 88-108MHz band. I don't know how I pick them up, at least one of them is Bulgarian if I remmeber correctly. I had no idea that the 66-73MHz band stopped being used in 2005, but back then I was just 6 years old. Now I'm curious, have to check it again what radios I get in the lower FM band.
@@Art7220 300/frequency in MHz = wavelenght in meters. So 190m - 570m is 1,6 MHz - 530kHz, standard MW or AM broadcast band. ST is AM or MW, KT is SW and UKT is FM. Names on scale are localized, of course in US you get only US stations on AM.
There's my hometown Belgrade. I am from Serbia (next to Bulgaria) and i've been watching your. Videos for years. Such a shame there is nobody who does European TVs the way you do.
I agree. I love that stuf. I mean the Soviet type electronics and obscure stuff... All the best from New Zealand! Edit: not just Soviet, of course, a lot of European gadgets are so cool and different from the Asian or American gizmos, we see so often. Euro-tronics rock!
I would love to see some repair videos of Soviet computer systems. They made a bunch of computers, obsolete by the western standards of the time, including a bunch of clones of the ZX Spectrum, many with English keyboards, presumably for export.
I'd like to see Australian radios. I've seen David Tipton cover those. The AM seems to be broken up by regions like QLD, VIC, and NSW. Does it work on US stations?
Here in Germany in the early 80s those russian electronics turned up in many "radio shack"-style shops. I had some "sokol" and other brand radios and a "TeleStar2002" B&W TV. The TV was built like critical equipment in Nuclear power plants or ICBMs. Incredible.
@@eaglewi no, actually in the west. Especially the small russian B&W portables were sold there in quite large numbers. They were also given away as a promotional gift for newspaper subscriptions and the like. I still have one of those small TVs which my mother got for subscribing to a TV guide magazine in the 80s.
I got Sokol 304 from ukraine it works perfectly. I had one as Child and it never worked but no one in my family bothered to have it fixed under warranty.
@@albinklein7680 Did you see any Soviet computers in Germany in that time period? I heard they made a bunch of ZX Spectrum clones, many of them with English keyboards, presumably for export.
@@gregorymalchuk272 ZX Spectrum was from 1982, those clones from 1986 or later. So they were obsoleted in west at that time. They were produced in low quantity and quality, often as home build projects. At that time they had to have english keyboard for compatibility. There were no localisation like in todays OS. And they were never licenced by Sinclair...
Awesome to see I'm not the only one from Bulgaria following. My dad had the same radio. Can't wait for your next tube restoration video. Keep up the awesome work.
Amazing stuff, thanks! TENTO was a trademark for electronics from various USSR manufacturers to be sold in foreign countries. As you could see all labels are in English. Many of those radios had 13-19 meter SW bands. Whilst corresponding models for domestic market had SW bands of 25 meters and longer only.
In the mid 90's FM changed from 66-74 to the western 88-108 MHz. It was very common to take your radio to the repair shop and ask them to re-tune it to the western standard instead of buying a new one.
Radio Luxembourg 208 meter 1440. As a child in Dublin Ireland this was the station for young people and pop music. It was a night time radio station so perfect for bed time. The state broadcaster RTE was a bit serious at the time. Keep up the Great work. 🙂☘️🇮🇪
Shango greatings from Bulgaria. At about 3:50 the second paper you show with the scematic on it has the factory procedure on it to convert this radios to 88-108mhz on it. Its the tables on the bottom. The black cap on the second radio is bulgarian made replacement
@@shango066 nothing that much to translate. it's just changing caps valius and putting caps in place of jumpurs around and inside the fm tuner, the two tables show witch are for 88-108 and witch are for the other, is actually very simple, they were made as you said for the foreign market so they are ready for bouth fm frequencies
around the tuner c2 from jumper to 30pf c3 from jumper to variable cap 2/7 pf c11 from 30 to 43pf c26 and c39 from 27 to 39pf c44 from 3.6 to 4.7pf jumpers "А to Б" and "Д to И" have to be changet to jumpers from "Б to Е", "В to Г","Г to Ж" in the tuner C1 from 1000 to 22pf C3 from 10 to 6.2pf C12 from 6.2 to 3.9pf
I’ve been following you for a couple of years. I still have no idea what your talking about in these vids . Having said that I still find it interesting as hell 👍😎
Dear Shango, keep up the good work with your videos, I’m forever impressed with the passion you have with fault finding that you have! I’d absolutely love to see a resurrection video on the CT-100 that you have some day. Best wishes, From the UK!
I`m from Bulgaria and watch your insane videos as well :D I `m actually learning electronics from you . So far i was able to restore several Bulgarian tube tv`s with help of your videos so , thank you for your content :) Keep it up .
I'm from Bulgaria and was quite surprised to see a package from my country on your channel. That was nice. The capacitor at 27:40 isn't a modern replacement. It's a Bulgarian capacitor from the Soviet era. It could still be a replacement but it's a USSR capacitor. The letters "БДС" mean ""Bulgarian national standard", and then the numbers are the actual standard. The orange transistor is the infamous in the former soviet areas KT315/KT361. The way you know is by the marking. I couldn't see what it was in your case. It should have a single letter somewhere, among other possible markings. If it's in the left top corner, it's KT315 (npn), otherwise it's KT361 (pnp) (in this case, the letter is usually in the middle of the transistor, but it can also be to the right). The letter is determining the exact type and variety of the transistor. For example: if it's a "G" ("Г") in the top left, the transistor is KT315G, if the letter is "B" ("Б") in the middle, it's KT361B. You have to look the exact characteristics based on that last letter and it's location, they differ between different letters (mainly the maximum collector voltage). Other than this, the device is basically just a general purpose silicon transistor. In many cases one can simply swap them with BC548 and BC558, or similar with little to no problem.
Interesting radios! They sound really good. By the way, you have the best "insane" videos here! It would be interesting just to know all the countries that people have watched your videos from.
Would love to see a follow-up video on you attempting to figure out why the second device picks up stations on FM and maybe try modifying the first one to see what it would take to make that receive as well. I have a beautiful old tube radio (Orion AR 612) that also has that eastern european FM range and always wondered if it would be possible to tweak it a bit to receive on the normal FM frequencies, without having to modify it too much... Anyway very good video , as always, thank you for taking the time to share this with us! Cheers! :)
Very interesting radios. Nice build quality. Since several LA TV stations still broadcast on the lower VHF band, I wouldn't be surprised if you did pick up a DTV signal. It makes sense the first one is an export model. None of the labeling is in cyrillic.
What a great Saturday a new Shango 066 video and a new president elect not a bad Saturday and of course it goes without saying fantastic video Russian radios definitely a different touch and always interesting
Looking into that little radio brings the science fiction comics of old to mind. The looks of their components look just like the cities. One would almost expect to see little flying cars darting between those buildings or towers that the parts. Very cool indeed.
I know this video is ancient history by now but... I'm kinda surprised you either didn't know or had never seen a band-shifted FM receiver. Here in the US the original (pre-war) FM band receivers used something similar, down in the 30s or 40s range, but post-war the FM allocation was bumped up to roughly where it is today, and most people who had pre-war sets had the serviceman modify them for the new band. For most radios you needed only to adjust existing trimmer components, but just like soviet band to USA band, you have to retune the oscillator to run in the range of the desired band, but you also have to stretch (actually you have to compress) the tuning to cover the new band, since we have a 20mhz allocation now but originally the lowband was 9.8-ish IIRC. So you have to adjust the band-spread(dial alignment) trimmers, the coil manipulates where the bottom of the band appears on the dial with the capacitor fully meshed, and the trimmer capacitor adjusts where the top of the band is with the tuning cap fully open. A few checks with a signal generator going back and forth between the adjustments at each end will give you the full tuning range, by the third or 4th tweak of the pair things should be good, adjusting one affects the other... As tolerances and built-to-price became tighter, this becomes less and less easy to do without having to change major components out... 73! DE KB3GUF
Hello! I live in Russia in the Samara region, I love vintage equipment. We already have no radio broadcasting at the frecuencies am,mw,sw, fm 63-74mHz. l myself change the frecuency to fm 88-108mHz. Sorry about the Google translation. Good Luck! Wow МП42Б!
Changing from oirt 65-74MHz band to CCIR 88-108MHz band is easy. In Poland we had the same band. With 15$ RTL-SDR (oscillator measurement without connecting anything) it's a 30-60min job if you have schematic and everything plays along, 2-3h or more if no schematic and/or there are issues. Myself I have three radios which I converted to the new band. First adjust the oscillator to 98.2-118.7MHz (iirc almost all used standard 10.7MHz IF) and then use some cheap FM transmitter to roughly tune the RF amp. Both oscillator and RF amp should have LC tanks capacitance roughly halved (trimmer is preferred). IF and demodulator shouldn't need adjustment if they are not messed up.
Cool radio... no worries about the strange FM coverage...with a little padding the FM band looks like it'll cover the 6 meters ham band very nicely. :-)
I see absolutely all Soviet components. There is nothing foreign there. Details marked with a rhombus - military acceptance - increased accuracy and reliability. On the dynamic - 78 means 1978. Red flat square capacitors didn't have a good reputation but were super cheap. The FM ranges of the receiver are easily rebuilt from the Soviet standard to the European standard. After 1990, many radio amateurs did this in their receivers. Sometimes it was a separate box with its own power, which was simply attached to an external antenna. Without it, there was a Soviet range, and when the box was put on a retractable telescopic antenna, the European range was accepted.
Our Shortwave frequency was shut off back in the early 2000’s here in Australia. I do miss the time announcement as it use to help me sleep. Nice Russian radios, they remind me a bit of the Sanyo radio In a black leather case I’ve got from the 1970’s.
Especially in the 80s the USSR did a massive export scheme with electronic goods to create direly needed revenue. Also goods were traded in turn, there is a great deal of western electronics components and equipment which made its way to East-Bloc countries via third parties like Yugoslavia, Poland, German Democratic Republic etc in order to circumvent trade embargos. I still have a fully functional miniature solid state Russian oscilloscope from the late 80s, bought in West Germany. Bulletproof. Alongside with a few USSR made radios just like the SOKOL. Well built.
@@rittenhouseunit7604 The kind of spying we have today would make the Soviets blush. I saw one of those true crime documentaries that traced a killer driving hundreds of miles and back again complete with video of the guy in the car driving at various places along the route. Between the phone signal and the cameras along the route, they might as well have been trailing him the whole time. Technology that enables tracking killers also tracks everyone else.
Decades ago, I used to work at a 'major defense' company, but in an open / commercial area. But, radios in general were banned from the entire facility. A receiver can also be a transmitter. It's got an oscillator, and that oscillator runs at 455 kHz (or 10.7 MHz). Apparently the Rooshians had some sort of ability to listen to conversations in the room, modulated upon any free-running oscillators nearby. Sure. I know it's specious and improbable. But, they were fanatic about that stuff. If there was even the *slightest*, marginal possibility....
Very interesting!! Thanks a million views for sharing! Amazing the amount of English on the radio's front as well as notes in the schematic and service guide. Also interesting are the city markings on the front. No USA cities!
"Tento" is a brand of Soviet electronic devices that were produced for export. They were often the same models that were available on the domestic market, but were of better quality and had English markings.
Another interesting radio is Unitra Julia made in Poland for eastern and western markets. The polish version has FM for east Germany and OIRT and they get converted to 88 to 108 mhz FM. I waiting for one in mail from Poland to USA and I won one in UK that was sold there I waiting for that one to arrive in USA also. It would be nice to send them both, The version for eastern block has issue low sound and needs to have fm converted. UK version seems to work fine. It woould be great to send them both in for repair/maitenace and have them featured on this awesome channel.
I have the same Sokol 308, it's not dead but it's very silent, some of the Wiring cut only the Antenna and the battery terminal is intact... At least I can do a re-wiring because of this Video :D
I had an East German radio and a Soviet Ukraine built radio when I lived in Central Europe. The plastics were far inferior to western plastics but the radios themselves were bullet proof. They did not seem to care about the temperature dipping below zero for days on end. They just worked.
If you were going to do a cap replacement and you wanted to keep the look of the Soviet Components, you could drill out insides of the old electrolytics and insert modern ones into the guts and remount the old one keeping the look of authenticity. Many restorers do this with vintage radios from the 20's to the 50's.
Hello, Thanks for all of your Electronics work on the channel. That second radio had the FM section re tuned from the OIRT Russia band to CCIR Western FM band. The Russians, after WW2, established their standard for the eastern block nations so that they could not listen to Western European radio stations (music, news, freedom etc.). After the fall of the Soviet union, in the early nineties, the East switched over to using the CCIR and so a lot of older radios had to be re tuned ,to be functional. Fortunately, all electronics produced in the eastern Europe was almost always designed with the mindset or hope of export to the west. So modifying the FM section usually was just a matter of changing a few caps and tweaking the coils. They had to do the reverse of the process to any Western Radios prior to 1989. Hope this helps. Thanks again for all your videos and hard work.
@@chuffpup B/W TV sets were compatible across Europe (except France and UK which used older standards) Only the sound IF was different. When colour arrived, all european countries used 625/50 standard, but with PAL or Secam colour system and 5,5 or 6,5 MHz sound IF (and 6,0 in UK and AM sound in France...). So it wasnt easy to made TV receiver for all european standards, but it was quite easy to made receiver for domestic standard + neighbour states (usually PAL/Secam and 5,5/6,5MHz sound). UHF channels were the same across Europe, VHF channels differed a little.
@@xsc1000 Even in Soviet Union ? ) I live in New Zealand (pal system. From '63 )... Thanks for that info, I didn't know all those things. I have a few TVs from the early 60s. Big fan of Shango. I dream of finding a _really_ old TV: 30s,40s,50s,... (not likely).
TV 3-4 is 64-73 mhz...I remember that!!...5-6 is 80-88mhz is the other.....64-90mhz is Russian and north China and Japan FM...I would keep a few good ones for that band!!!!...my Bearcat has the whole band all the way down to 25mhz...the DX is very good doing the summer.....I am born and raised in L A ....grew up with K Earth 101...since the 1960s...it was the Best!!!
Hard to see from looking at the video but It looks like the oscillator coil in the second radio has fewer turns on it. Would that increase the frequency response of the tuned circuit, pushing it into the active FM band? Presumably the antenna / RF coil would have to be modified in the same way.
It was a common thing, back in the day, to convert the OIRT (eastern) standard FM radios to CCIR (western) if you wanted to listen to other than propaganda. Actually, doing this mod is a bit more complex, than speeding up the oscillator, beacause the now used FM band is approx 3x wider than the obsolete OIRT. Here in Hungary, the biggest radio manufacturer Videoton made all of its radios dual standard from the late 70s.
@@danutbe6541 I know this tuner, I have a silver one. The 7200 is way the most sophisticated circuit made by Videoton. It is able to receive both OIRT and CCIR stations, so it is dual FM too.
Nice! Russia doesn't use the 65.8-74mhz (OIRT) band much if all anymore, most of the other eastern European countries that also used it have switched over to the 87.5 - 108mhz (ITU1) band. Mostly inline with the rest of Europe and US (the US starts at 88mhz). The only outlier now is Japan that used to be 76-95 but since analog TV died it is now 76-108.
Manufacture of components were actually spread across the whole soviet union, there was one in Estonia named Tallinn Semiconductor Factory A-1381 in Tondi district, that manufactured photoresistors, varistors, transistors, thyristors and microchips for mostly military use, although it is said that rejects that were out of spec went for commercial use._
These scammers again, also on my channel geeeeez... by the way, these russian radios are amazing, I almost got one from Bulgaria but these pandemic thing makes everything hard to obtain. Thanx man for this video, it helped me with a little GE P1720A with a very low sensitivity on am.
it is possible to by converter circuits to make an orit band fm work on the current fm they are still for sale here in CZ. I am working on a 62 Tesla that has this Orit band and trying to decide if to re tune, it was also made for export with the normal fm band, or get a converter pcb
The 60-90mhz is Russian and Japanese Bands..... when E Skip happens....It is good to have one in that range...U may be surprised....I have gotten VHF Marine on that band via images...I have did mods to that band though the years...miss the days when TV audio was on the band!!!
Can you pick up 760 KGB on it? That would be appropriate! 23:38 That’s definitely digital TV. I found a PBS repeater on 5 in San Bernardino, which would be 66-72 MHz.
The SOKOL 308 came in 2 versions with different VHF ranges. If you look at the circuit it will tell you which coils you need to tweak. Most sets will do high and low side injection and if you then tweak it to match them it should work OK. Check the coils and value of the capacitors too as the Oscillator will need to be changed quite a lot. Check the differences between the two sets. I have the manual here if you want a copy.... hope your Russian is better than mine! The chip is a mixer so it must mix up or down to 10.7 Mhx. All the parts you need to tweak or change are inside that can.
I used to convert PMR Sets to work ion Band 1 in the UK by putting capacitors across thee coils if memory serves. You may need to reduce them and change IF Injection here.
I found that you can greatly increase print quality if you import the schematic as a raster image into inkscape and then vectorize it and print the resulting vector graphic.
Was there a big movement for home experimentation, collection, repair of electronics in the ussr? I come from a South African context. A lot if the older magazines were UK printed. The equipment was UK, Dutch, Japanese and to a lesser degree American.
An analog radio is unable to demodulate DTV, as it is broadcast in packets of computer language (1s and 0s). I have an SDR receiver that tunes the VHF/UHF TV frequencies. The DTV carriers can be seen on the waterfall display and they cause a change in the background noise, but nothing can be demodulated. I enjoy the soviet-era radios.
Indeed it is the band that in the cold war was used as FM broadcasting band It is still believed that it is still being broadcasted on this band in ex-sovietic countries, infact I received this year via radio propagation (Sporadic-E)
why does the talk radio station sound like it's ringy? it's like there's a 300-400Hz 'ring' present on the audio. I've heard it on the talk radio station here, too. You can hear it at the end of most words, and it "rings" into silence, like someone tapping on a microphonic tube almost. sort of a "ding ding ding" with each word.
20:25 That loud hissing sound is a an ATSC 1.0 television signal, like channel 5 or 6 (could be direct or image of the actual signal). EDIT: All of my life, I had been told that people in socialist countries could not own shortwave radios. After seeing presentations of Eastern Block radios, it seems they are in great abundance, more popular than in North America.
Bulgaria (like most post communist countries) have switched to the western FM band in the 1994, so most radios from there will be converted. Western FM band is much wider, but it is usually enough to tweak filter coils, adjust the oscillator, and cut off some capacitors. Sometimes you have to cut off some turns from the filter coils too.
