@@12voltvids Yes, if you do the mod you get Kahn stereo. To make it compatible with C-Quam you need a phase shifter chip. But even when listening to a C-Quam signal in Kahn mode you still get a stereo effect, just not with the correct left-to-right separation. And the strange thing is, if you transmit a Haeco CSG recording (like The Association's Greatest Hits, or Cream's "White Room") on a C-Quam transmitter and receive it in Kahn mode, the vocals only come out of one channel! You could hear it on this radio even without the stereo mod, just by flipping between LSB and USB.
@@vwestlife I will have to try that I will play creams White room through my AM stereo Cquam transmitter and tune it in on my Sony radio and flip between c-clam and con mode as it has a switch and observe what happens.
That has to be the coolest radio I ever seen, and have two for stereo am, I didn’t even know that was possible. This radio must have been a gem back in 1985
Not possible as there are no AM stereo channels much in the same way that my old Sansui quad receiver will not receive quad signals since no -one transmits any.
I have an ICF-7600DA, which is again, completely different from both the 7600 and 7600D (I think it's mostly the same circuitry as the 7600D, but the front panel is different). It has a huge LCD that tries to resemble an analog dial. I found it in an e-waste container about 10 years ago. It's quite beat-up, but works fine. Not very impressed with its sensitivity, some of my cheap Soviet receivers beat it, like the VEF-206. I'm not too happy that they used CD4066 or 4053 MUX ICs for selecting the different band filters. They have crosstalk and losses at SW frequencies that can very well be the source of the mediocre performance in my opinion. At least I couldn't find any faults in mine, the adjustments seems untouched, so I'm guessing it's close to its original capabilities. The user manual does not state any data about its sensitivity, nor the service manual, so I guess that tells something. They wasn't very proud of it. It's a nice radio for everyday use, but not for DXing. This ICF-2010 on the other hand, seems to be a great performer. But it's in a completely different category. Midrange vs high-end.
I've never considered my own ICF-2010 multi-band receiver as "Vintage". It's been an everyday workhorse since I bought it in the 90's! In my opinion, these are still a Top performer for Shortwave listening. You can buy a parts "Kit" that allows them to perform better then new, for very little money. So, if yours isn't up to par, that can be easily remedied. (I forget, not everyone has the skills with a soldering iron or is experienced with electronics like I am. BUT, if you buy the parts "Kit", I'm sure you can find a local man/woman to install it.)
Did you know that the Casio AD-4150 power adapter is a perfect match for the original Sony adapter for the 2010? It's a real transformer too, so there is no switching power supply noise as you get with the cheap adapters today. Keep up the great videos!
I bought mine in 1995. It's travelled the world with me. Needs at total refurb. Several buttons not working, display intermittent, poor reception. All fixable. But not easy to power up when stripped down, so repairs are difficult. But the best portable ever.
Just tuned in! I lucked in with mine as it still looks and works at factory specs! Will review the whole vid tomorrow as it is fun to see the functions described and in use. Thanks
Simplicity of operation is key to it being used. Some of my ham radios are so complicated to operate I have to break out the manual every time i need to do anything. I like simplicity. One of the reasons i will never buy Tesla, besides the fact that I think they are ugly is the fact that you have to look at a touch screen and navigate through menus to do anything. My car has a screen, but also buttons and knobs. A volume knob, temperature knob and fan knob. Buttons for climate control ect. Yes buttons on steering wheel. Dedicate buttons for cruise, cluster control, station, / mp3 track selection and volume on the wheel plus voice control if I really want to deal with that headache. Nope when i want to turn the volume up or down there is a dial for that and my hand knows where it is without looking.
In New Zealand your Sony ICF 2010 is known and labled as 2010 D. The Sony ICF 2010 was the model with out all the extra memories and tuneing knob.That one was tuned by pressing up & down buttons.
Great video! I've wanted one of these for years and finally picked one up at a ham-fest last year. There are some great sites/threads dedicated to repairing this radio. Apparently, after all these years, the ribbon cables are very fragile and easily broken. Sony doesn't sell them anymore. People are actually having to repair them so you can imagine how much fun that would be.
Yes, this is the finest communications receiver Sony has made. I have an original one as well. I even used to have the SONY longwire antenna kit, that assembly was quite impressive. The Achilles heel of this unit was the external antenna front end, they were very sensitive to static, there was a FET that was known to fail in the front end. Fortunately, mine never suffered from this. I had a chuckle when you powered it up without the backup batteries, I learned about this conundrum years ago.
My 1985 ICF-2010 id still fully functional, and has the kit you speak of. Very VERY sturdy radio…and after almost 40 years, it’s only ever needed servicing once.
I always wanted one of these radios, but I could never afford one. There is just one feature Sony missed, it should have had a remote socket like a tape deck, so the timer could start the cassette recorder.
I still have a Radio Shack branded radio made by Sangean, that’s similar in form and vintage to this. Yours has SSB (mine does not) .. nice touch. Today it’s mainly used as a QRM/noise/interference/finder. Even used it to fox hunt a pirate FM station, way back when.
I have a Sony ICF-7600DS that's over 30 years old and still working fine. It has many of the same features as yours but only two thirds the size (approx). It had a crack on the PCB where the power jack attached but that was easily fixed. I'll have to open it up again to see if it has the pesky SM caps. Great vids, always learn something new. Cheers.
Doesn't have syncronus detector. That is one of the most usefull features. Allows for detecting either the upper or lower side band from an AM signal drastically reducing interference from adjacent channels.
@@12voltvids I have the last of the small portables, ICF-SW7600GR and it does have the sync detector, and it does work decently but it is not as precise and high quality as your 2010 is. As for the ribbon cables, they are hard to find but there are probably some NOS in various parts centers still in existence the trick is finding those places.
Those Sonys are still great....I have the icf 2003 and sw7600gr... from the late 70s-early 80s 35 to 40 years old and still working good.....ICF2010...is good...but on mine the antenna would disconnect...I had to solder the it and there was no more problem... I wish I still had Mine?...I think the Digital Went out....that is why I no longer have it
Really nice radio which seems to be popular and hold its price well. The cheapest working model I could find here in the uk was 250 Canadian dollars! A bit out of my price range right now. Think I’d need to find a “fixer upper”!!!
I have the ICF-2010 and ICF-2001. I also have both wall chargers. Neither of them turn on. The 2010 clock runs. I have both because the keyboard quit working on the 2001 and I immediately bought the 2010. I was working in Central America and the only thing to listen to was BBC. I remember the radios were great and expensive. I wonder how they would stand against the new portables. Thanks for showing the ICF.
I received mine last week from Ebay. It was $100 + tax! The description said it exhibited an "Error 3" indication. I researched that on the Web, and discovered it means a power supply problem, which I figured would be easy to fix. It was. One of the battery terminals was corroded. It works perfectly, except for the back-light, which I'll fix some day, if I feel energetic. I do indeed believe it's still the best portable SW receiver around. The only one that I know of that's better, is the Lowe HF-150----that's actually a tiny "table-top" radio, rather than a conventional portable.
When these first came out I bought one, worth every penny. Last year I found one at the Brighton boot sale for ten pounds in perfect condition. I almost tore my britches getting my wallet out!
Yup i would buy one did that too. Even though there isn't much left to listen to on the shortwave bands. AM broadcasting is heading into extinction. Car manufactures dropping AM faster than a hot potato.
our little local station i listen to does that quite often, goes off the air for several minutes at a time for some reason. once it was off for a couple hours. i'm guessing technical issues but i don't know. that's the trouble now, most are run by computers so if something happens there doesn't seem to be an actual person there to fix it
You may have noticed that when you insert a plug for an external antenna, the AM BCB pre-amp is disabled. But if you insert the plug part way, it isn't, but it still connects the antenna. That's a flaky solution, and the connection isn't reliable. I was going the install a switch, to solve the problem. But that's WORK. I recently found a solution that works really well, and is very simple. Take some fairly course sandpaper, and sand the plug. Draw the sandpaper in the direction perpendicular to the plug. The extra friction will cause the plug to stay put. Also, the contact is better. There's no scratchiness or instability in signal strength. Of course, this mod to the plug doesn't affect its usefulness for other applications. I also gave it a very light film of silicone, so its corrosion resistance isn't reduced.
There is a reason the preamp is disabled. Most that use an external antenna use a long wire. Long wires have a tendosy to pick up static charges from the air. The preamp is very sensitive to being zapped by this. So they shunt it out when an external antenna is used as a long wire should have enough gain to negate any advantage the preamp would provide.
@@12voltvids The radio is subject to static damage even with the pre-amp bypassed, and we all know about the potential problem with Q303. Static protection is always desirable, with ANY radio. Three ways are 1) Parallel diodes, connected with reversed polarity, from the antenna to ground. 2) An RF choke to ground. 3) An antenna tuner, with series capacitors & a shunt inductor ("T" type). The diodes (especially Schottkys) are the fastest acting (don't forget to remove them, if you're transmitting!!!), due to the RL-time delay of an inductor, so it's best to use both. Where I live, even the most powerful AM station (50 KW, but it's 80 miles away) benefits from that pre-amp.
It's interesting to see this in comparison with my decade-newer ICF-SW7600G. The 2010 has a lot of the same features I recognise from my own, but mine is missing the air band, bandwidth switch, S-meter and has no tuning knob. Its fine tune mode also only does 1 kHz increments, but it has an SSB fine tune knob to compensate.
There's not really much of a comparison between the 2010 and the 7600. But the only similarities between the two is that they can tune in single side band and am / FM. The dual bandwidth IF is one but the big one is a synchronous detector. That was huge and very few radios featured a synchronous detector. It was probably the best feature of any radio that I've ever owned and was one of the reasons I bought this one. When listening to shortwave stations you always get noise in the background from adjacent signals either above or below the one you're trying to hear. When signal conditions deteriorate the synchronous detector can be in the difference between an enjoyable experience and one where you end up with a headache trying to decipher your signal from all the background noise. I used to do a lot of medium wave DX when they were plenty of stations and at night every 10 kilohertz that was something interesting to listen to from other parts of the country the synchronous detector and wideband made all the difference in the world. I could pick either the upper or lower side band and put it in a wide mode and get really good sound quality without hearing a local station that was just a little bit above or a little bit below the station I was pulling in. It was almost like magic the way it works. Some people will put their receiver in SSB at zero beat the carrier but there's always a slight amount of drift and I just never sounds quite right, synchronous detector locks it on the carrier there's no drift it just works.
@@12voltvids I don't know about the 7600, but the 7600G had a sync detector as well. I believe it was one of the cheapest options available at the time that had one.
Dead from the DC jack and batteries, too? One of the most common problems is that the bypass contact goes bad in the DC socket, permanently disconnecting the battery compartment. Sometimes the socket needs to be replaced, but it is usually enough to plug a jack in it a few times, it cleans the contact enough to work again. I don't like flooding PCBs with contact cleaner, especially not in radios, because if the oil from the clenaer seeps into any trimmer capacitor, it screws up the alignment permanently, it can be fixed only by replacing the affected trimmer caps and re-align the radio. The oil between the plates changes the dielectric constant so much that it can change the capacitance by an order of magnitude. You can wash the oil off of air trimmers or sometimes from open-type plastic film trimmers, but you can't do much with ceramic trimmers because the clearance is so tight between the plates to any cleaner to be very effective, yet it's enough for the oil to seep in and tune the capacitor out of range. The worst thing is that even if it can be tuned in, it will drift over time as the solvents and oils evaporate/migrate between the plates. I've seen this issue with an oscilloscope, where the previous user shot the Volts/DIV wafer switch with contact cleaner, flooded the compensation trimmer caps, and after that the 100MHz scope had problems displaying even a 10kHz square wave right...
Nice. I would have cut the PSU wires to have "fresh" unoxidized copper and also make sure the soldered parts don't lineup. This way, if someone walks on the repair and the soldered blob pierce through the insulation, there's no short circuit.
The rosin in the solder will clean it up. Not concerned with anyone stepping on the cord. The solder isn't sharp and the heat shrink is pretty heavy, it won't break.
As i watch this video, my ICF 2001D lies open and i still wonder why is that wire glued to the lcd screen panel. You also didn't tell us what actually that wire did. I bought one in a pretty messed up condition for a few bucks and repaired it. Never ever seen a radio picking FM signals so accurately, many guys praise the tecsun series but i havent seen a single radio as good as this one. I have two of them, one with SSB and one without the SSB.
@@12voltvids Wow, 1985....amazing it still works without having been used for years. I think Sony made a terrible mistake not producing this unit for at least another five or seven years. The performance was just that good. I remember when this came out and wanted one so bad, but was a poor teenager. Oddly The furniture store IKEA when it first came to the USA right around the same time also featured this radio on the front page and various other pages in their 1988 paper catalogue back then. (page with sleeper sofa) hiding on a shelving unit behind it.
But all the model I a have used , those they are very good with all frequency , but none have no any spare parts not available of any markets , generally a small capacitor too . Though those are nearabout 40 to 60 years old manufacture , yet look like recent manufactures .
I have a sony, TR- 1000 super sensitive, that someone gave me. I can't get it to work and know nothing about electronics, I think there is a guy in NC, mabe ashville area who works on these, do any of you guys know how to get in touch with this guy? Thanks
I was expecting some capacitor leakage, but you would have replaced them if that was so. So no leaks and no evil smd ones eather :-D Ive watched Radio cruncher recap the bad sony versions, he uses the side cutter method to remove them as well. He replaces them with smd types as original, not enough space to stick radial caps in.
@@12voltvids 50kHz - 2 G , tunable filters, USB, LSB, waterfall displays, and under $300 I think. Ultimate toy for the money, I think I am going to get one.
The Malachite DSP2 radio is quite fun. Recent firmware updates have reduced the amount of injected noise from the screen. I think that folks make too much of it as you can just tap a button to turn off the screen, making any buzzing go away. I follow the Telegram group, and it's pretty much impossible to get one now because of sanctions, or so they say.
@@12voltvids Yes low on both am and fm. It's also low on headphone jack. If you mean the jack next to green jack with tape like sign, i can't get any sound from that one
@@12voltvids Thanks. I was thinking the speaker might be faulty or the slider volume pot. How do I check the speaker and the pot whether if they are problematic or not when i open up the device? Sorry if i am being boring, i am trying to learn the basics of maintenance of radios and cassette players :)
@@soulsirius if there is no output on the record output it is before the amplifier. The record our has to be plugged into another amplifier or recorder. You will hear nothing with headphones as it is a low level output not amplified.
Longscrew damage is basically up to meme status on Louis Rossmann's channel, so using different-length fasteners is alive and well in the world of Apple. It makes rather more sense in the case of Sony though, the Japanese would tend to be more meticulous about this sort of thing.
I had an ICF-2001. The ribbon cable connections were a real problem. I don't know if I still have it. The book that came with it had a great directory of stations. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RifYM5V9ics.html
@@12voltvids We've all known that fluorescents cause RFI, that you shouldn't try to evaluate a receiver in a store that has them, unless they have an outdoor antenna with co--ax feed. They don't have switching supplies (maybe they do, today), but do generate H.V. RF to ionize the gas in the tube. I HATE switching power supplies! They'd be OK, if they had effective filtering, but they don't. My ICF2010 didn't come with the AC P.S. No problem, I thought, I had one that would work. Nope! It was a switching type, and the RF hash was horrendous. I did find a suitable P.S. on Ebay. For people who are interested, it's a Casio AD-4150, which was made for a Casio calculator.
