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Zo te zien is dat een basic stereotorentje. Er hoort een losse niet-afgestemde loopantenne bij te zitten die je met een klein plat connectortje aansluit. Er zit geen AM antenne ingebouwd. Heb je die antenne niet, dan hoor je sowieso niets. Heb je die wel, maar hoor je niets, dan moet je 'm even buitenshuis testen om storingen door elektronica, en afscherming door isolatiematerialen en gewapend beton uit te sluiten. Ik zou geen wonderen verwachten met dergelijke apparaten; meestal waren die niet bedoeld en ontworpen voor een gevoelige middengolfontvangst. Zeker nu de zenders kleiner zijn, kan het moeilijk zijn om wat op te pikken.

Yes! Seen from the front, slide the carriage all the way to the left. Then turn the calculator around so you're looking at it from the back. You can see the wide drive gear driving the smaller gear of the counter. That small gear has a VERY small timing dot on the surface of one of the gear's teeth. That timing dot has to correspond to the notch that is cut in the right side of the frame when you install the carriage, with the crank in the locked/rest position. See if you can see it in the locked position. If it's not, the gear has jumped a few teeth and you have to remove the carriage (or simply remove the carriage limit pin on the bottom of the frame, slide it out just enough to allow the counter gear to spin freely), spin the carriage gears until you see the timing mark, and re-insert the carriage. It is a fairly risk-free operation, you don't have to take apart the entire carriage. It took me a very long time to find this out. I was aware there should be a timing mark from repair instructions on the internet, but nowhere did it say exactly where to find the timing mark afaik. With regards to the clearing lever - in my case, the pin that follows the 'spiral ramp' to couple the clearing shaft to the gears - that pin was worn out so the shaft didn't get pulled inwards enough. I tried removing it, didn't budge. I ended up simply bending the pin to compensate for the wear. It's very soft metal, it just mushroomed when i tried to gently tap it out with a hammer.

@@mfbfreak Thanks for the reply i had actually timed the unit by moving the main shaft through the number wheels and fixed that problem and when i looked at the gear you were disgussing the mark on the tooth lined up with the vee mark. The problem i am left with and at a lost with is the reset which i am only able to achieve by rolling back the numbers until they are all on 9 it will then reset to zero but however once it has been reset using this method it will not reset until the same operation is repeated and in general will not reset until all the numbers are moved off zero. Again thanks for your help

I sadly can't help you with that. I'm not a specialist in this kind of mechanical stuff, far from it. I hope you manage to find the issue! Until someone else chimes in, or you can find someone with knowledge, your best bet is to see what causes it to not want to reset by moving individual gears manually. I have a 'hunch' that it may be that the clearing lever is not working correctly. Check out the pin and ramp that pulls the entire clearing bar into the number wheels. If that thing doesn't get to the exact right spot when in its resting position, it might block something.

@@mfbfreak thanks again for your reply. At the moment nothing is making much sense so i am going to paint it up put it together, have to work out best way to remove paint from raised numbers (as i can reset it with a rather inconvenient process) and will come back to it at a later date Just as a point of interest numbers that have a stamped recess impression i have used an acrylic paint pen and carefully washed off excess with rag and water with a successful result but at this point not sure how i will do the raised numbers i have played around with an abrasive ink rubber (might work looking slightly promising) anyway cheers for your help all input is appreciated

Sadly, there's no calculation for it. I just tried stuff out.

Nope! They were made in multiple different colors. You can find old Philips catalogs on www.mfbfreaks.com.

@@mfbfreak thanks for pointing that out. I never knew that.

Thanks! For some reason, it's the one video that keeps drawing hundreds if not thousands of views.

There are too many things that could cause it, to be able to explain it in the comments. First thing to do is to measure if the supply voltages to the different parts of the radio stay constant, while the sound is fading out. If the supply voltage drops, that's likely the problem. And that can be caused by an electrolytic capacitor slowly failing. Also measure current consumption. If the voltage drops while the current rises, the speaker amplifier may be drifting from its correct working point - again caused by leaky caps. Try finding an electronics forum (old fashioned, yeah i know) and ask for help. In the netherlands we have Circuitsonline, i'm sure there are english language forums too like the EEVblog forum (but more specifically for electronics repair)

Local assembly from imported parts seems likely. In the former eastern bloc parts got shipped for thousands of kilometers to factories in random places.

Thanks!

Omdat de toetsen blijven hangen doordat ze letterlijk tegen elkaar aan drukken. Er past dus geen vijl tussen zonder dat je ze loshaalt. Als je ze los haalt, kan je ze wat naar voren trekken waardoor er meer ruimte is. Geloof ik, het is alweer een tijd geleden dat ik de Philicorda's heb verkocht. Het vijlsel valt op de werkbank. Er zit niets onder de toetsen qua elektronica. De toetscontacten zitten iets verder 'in' het orgel, daar komt geen stof op.

Without the capacitor, with the starter connected in parallel to the SOX lamp, it takes way too many start attempts before it finally ignites - if it ignites at all. This is very bad for the SOX lamp. It does not have filaments like a fluorescent lamp does, so every time it tries to ignite, material gets sputtered off. It takes about 10 times as many ignition attempts for it to start without the capacitor. Do not do this. SOX lamps are not made anymore, the remaining stock has gotten quite expensive. After it starts, the capacitor is switched out of circuit because the starter contact opens again - so once ignited and once the starter opens up, it has no influence anymore. You can do without the starter (use a manual momentary/push button switch) but you need the capacitor. A suitable capacitor costs something like 2 or 3 euro so omitting it is false economy.

@@mfbfreak got it. Does an electronic ballast work as well? Or does it have to be conventional?

I don't know if a electronic ballast meant for fluorescents will work well. The most important thing is the lamp current - it should be 330 to 350mA ideally for the 18w lamp. Look up the lamp datasheets for the appropriate current for different lamps. With an electronic ballast, that's quite hard to measure because most multimeters don't play well with high frequency drivers. If the current matches but the voltage doesn't, it's possible that the driver will cut out because it assumes the lamp is broken. If you want to buy a ready made driver, you can get some here while stock lasts: voorraad.dbl-verlichting.nl/collections/philips-sox-exc-evsa Finally, be aware that my video is from a 230v european point of view, all of this won't work on 120v USA mains unless you hook up a 240w split phase outlet where you wanna use it. For 120v you gotta figure out something else. There are suitable drivers available.

RF germanium transistors, as well as certain silicon transistors (the bc148 series), can in fact go bad. It doesn't happen too often, but it definitely does happen.

@@mfbfreak You must not be in the US. Here, where the first transistors were unreliable, the US government and military were the first large purchasers of transistors and very early they developed tests to determine the reliability of solid state devices. The hermetically sealed metal packages solved most of the problems with germanium transistors. Ttin whiskers were never a problem and when the Japanese imported a huge amount of consumer electronics, their transistors were equally as good. I've read about the major problems the Europeans had with tin whiskers in the AC117, etc. germanium transistors.

That's a ceramic capacitor. You can try out anything between 10 and 100pF.

Although caps can absolutely go bad, in this radio the problems were not the capacitors. Capacitor swapping wouldn't have fixed this radio.

@@mfbfreak not that was what i mean- an old tehnician told me that the tuning cap is in most of the cases what become faulty

Yes, it is an unmodulated sine wave. If you tune the receiving radio to a quiet spot, you will hear the noise disappear. You won't hear a tone, but the background noise disappearing is a clear sign the oscillator works. If you tune it just to the side of a weak radio station, you can hear a tone, which is the heterodyne (difference) beat note between the carrier frequency of the radio station, and of the oscillator of the radio.

@@mfbfreak thank you... I've forgotten the details of the video.. so you're saying that the radio's internal oscillator will be picked up on the other radio as a "blank spot," correct? that makes sense... and then one can tune the radio to a weak radio signal and then off of it a bit and one will hear a tone? ... but that's not related to diagnosing the not working radio, correct? And, in your video, did you not imply that one would hear a tone from the bad radio if the bad radio's internal oscillator is working? but you are saying now that it is not a tone but a silent "sound"? correct?

Thanks! I'm not 15 anymore if you went by my older videos hehe. Channel has existed for half my life now. Maybe i should update my profile picture which is already 10 years old but eh, it's not like i'm catfishing people on the apps with it lol

@@mfbfreak Lol catfishing on here would be unique for sure. So you have been into radio since you were 15? Same here, started at 12 for me. I am much older now. Most guys into radio are much older than you, which is why I mentioned it. I only know of a few others on here who are around your age or younger. Hope you continue to upload more AM content, as it is slowly dying off here in the US.

Het is een kartonnen plaatje (geen vinyl!) met een heel dun plasticlaagje er op waar de groef in is geperst. Die groef is daardoor minder diep dan van een normale plaat, en daardoor blijft ie snel hangen of laat ie sneller over. Dit om de plaatjes extra goedkoop te kunnen produceren. Het was immers iets goedkoops, net zoals de verjaardagskaarten met een melodietje er in van tegenwoordig. Daarnaast is het karton na al die jaren niet meer helemaal recht.

Yep! Though the one on my work bench is mostly used to catch little bits of metal when i'm using steel wool to clean and polish things.

Thanks!

As far as i am aware, it's an Albanian produced radio (URT Iliria, Durres) likely based on a Romanian design. Milcov has indeed made identical radios.

Milcov for export

Pretty cool! They should've (re)introduced those around the 2000s when incandescent christmas lights were still popular, and LEDs too expensive. Nowadays, LEDs are so dirt cheap that you can't compete with them. Sadly, the green indicator lights i used are truly horrible quality. They have already started to dim after about 50 hours of use on a lower power level. I hope i can some day source better quality green lights, but i think if i buy them from China, they are pretty much all from the same factory.

918 misschien? Ik weet het niet meer... Is al zo lang geleden. Op een andere radio staat hij als Brussel 2 op de schaal tussen 300 en 350 meter.

AM stereo was altijd een droom van me om te hebben! Maar helaas, in de tijd dat France Bleu nog in C-quam uitzond, had ik nog niet de kennis en ervaring om een decoder te bouwen. Zou leuk zijn als de hedendaagse kleine AM stations in C-quam zouden uitzenden. De antenne is actief, met een EF80. Die wordt gevoed met een kleine losse 6,3v/100v voeding. Alles tussen de 50 en 200v is goed.

Enjoy!