# 03 2016 Vol-22

Next NMRCC meeting: March 13th 2016

— Mirror radios, all years —

Sentimental value is hard for others to measure. For that price, I'd pass but I've had 1 and preferred the Scott 4310 over it in spades.

Even the Marantz 10b. But there are even a lot of SS tuners I'd buy 1st, get as much pleasure from and pocket the difference such as the Sherwood Sel-300 or Micro-100, Fisher TFM-1000 (I think is the best tuner from Fisher), Scott 4312 -Brian

The 1964 Fisher TFM-1000 FM Stereo Tuner by Richard Majestic

A week ago I bought off eBay a non-working Fisher TFM-1000 FM tuner, introduced in 1964, almost

right after they introduced in 1963 the FM-1000 a all tube FM tuner that also used two RCA Nuvistors, 6CW4. at the time the FM-1000 was considered the best FM tuner in the world and was sold as FM station monitor receiver too. The TFM-1000 is all transistor tuner and used some plastic cased devices and ger-manium transistors too. Fast switching transistors were coming to market in 1963 but quiet linear transistor were very new. In 1964 I worked for Brookhaven Nation-al Labs and was a lowly 2-year degree electronic technician but when I read about this all transistor Fisher tuner I wanted one. Well it took over 50 years and I finally have one.

I’ve got to tell you how good FM can sound when the tuner is the greatest. Even with week signals there is no tuner in-duced distor-tion, amazing. It might sound as good as my REL 646 tube tuner. The de-tector is delay-line that creates a constant width square wave. I looked at the IF strip on a off-air signal and each stage had a near perfect sine wave. The last IF ampli-fier stage is two directly coupled transis-tors, the output a nice 10.7MHz. square wave that feeds the limiter and frequency detector stage. And just think, this beauti-

(Continued on page Four)

1910 Antenna Coupler [from my email traffic] Hi, I was given your organizations name from Don Woods. I had contacted him to try to gain some information about a loose coupler that my dad acquired sometime around WW1. The only iden-tifier found on it is ATENUE Feb. 1, 1910. I have attached pictures and if you would be able to share any information about it and whether it has any value or not I would greatly appreciate it.

(Continued on page Five)

2A3

R Majestic’s 50 year quest to own a Fisher TFM-1000

Les Davidson find a ‘40s Zenith for Ford radio tuner

Email question from my website about Antenna Couplers

Two

The NMRCC Meeting Minutes by John Hannahs

as he needed a win. Most of his entries were of his own creation. The single tube models had multiple envelopes inside, presumably to lower cost. A secondary L/C trap was sometimes included to notch out stations that

swamped out the weaker signals, pret-ty clever: photo above. Don Menning brought in his combina-tion of home brew and early small tran-sistor radios. The units with directional antennas were just that. Point com-pass to north and take a bearing to the transmitter in the form of a null. Of course you have to remember the 180 degree ambiguity situation. The small radio with the red knob is his "rock ra-dio". Several others are 2 transistor receivers from post war Japan. Others have six or more transistors and are

NMRCC 2016 MEETINGS MAR 13th - Mirror radios, all years APR 10th - Test equipment and classroom demonstration equipment- tube testers, signal generators, oscilloscopes, bridges, meters and etc MAY - Spring Picnic JUN - Television sets, 1946 through 1970 (anything you can carry into the conference room) JUL - Early TV cameras, camera tubes and CRTs AUG - Foreign Radios SEP - Field day/radio reception contests OCT - Fall picnic, ribeye steaks Las Cruces NOV - Wild Card Sunday” (nifty science gizmos, novel science toys, or non- ra-dio collection, electronics, or science related that you think will dazzle your fellow members DEC - Holiday party – theme: Little-known radio manufacturer and rare radios

NMRCC February 14 meeting

Approximately 10 members met at Qlabs and since it was valentines day we decided to keep the meeting a little informal.

The discussions were about our Febru-ary theme was about early radios, namely crystal detector and one tube types, individually or kit constructed. We also brought in early portable tran-sistor radios of the Imported variety. Collectively we could create an inter-esting museum display as to how early basic radio receivers were created. Typically a long wire antenna, good earth ground, and high impedance headphones of around 2000 ohms were all that was needed, no power supply. Chuck Burch won our contest

NMRCC Officers for 2016

Don Menning: President

John Estock: Vice President

Chuck Burch/RMajestic: Treasurer

John Hannahs: Secretary

Mark Toppo/RMonty: Membership

David Wilson: Director

Richard Majestic: Director

Ray Trujillo: Director

Richard Majestic: Newsletter Edi-tor (President pro-tem)

Three

collectable. See something you need and just ask for a price.

Shown below, are entries by Ray Trujil-lo. Lower left is a crystal radio, tuning by variometer and galena detector pro-

tected in a glass dome. Above it is an example using a tapped inductor for tuning. A slider tuned radio is to the right of the variometer radio. The round shaped radio has the crystal detector sealed in a small can at the top. You can see the pharma plastic container below to the right has a tapped induc-tor where individual turns are shunted to raise the resonant frequency. Novel indeed is the radio with a square wound coil, presumably to present a right angle on the coil form to make a better contact with the selector arm. A razor blade is screwed to the base and a safety pin with carbon tip finds a "hot spot" that supplies diode action for de-tection. Ray claims it works and blue blades work even better. The inductor with sliding internal coil is part of an early radio and it's claim to fame is bet-ter antenna matching. Hawkins Electri-cal Guide from 1917 is an interesting side feature as it features the design of an electric car. All this is keeping best with the theme of early radio before vacuum tubes and transistors. ~ JH

NMRCC meeting photos

Inventor Who Topped Edison Dies Artur Fischer, a German inventor who reg-

istered more than 1,100 patents, including the first synchronized camera flash and an

anchor that millions of do-it-yourselfers use to secure screws into walls, died on Jan. 27

at his home in Waldachtal, in southwestern Germany. He was 96. His total number of inventions put him just ahead of Thomas

Edison, who had 1,093 patents to his name. (NYT)

Four

fully engineered tuner was designed in 1963. To make it work after the eBay seller delivery, I found only one bad transis-tor, a TO-3 germanium power transistor for the series pass DC voltage regulator and one leaking radial lead electrolytic on the limiter-detector PCB. I replaced all the electrolytics that looked like the bad one and all the axial leads ones that had started leaking. No other bad tran-sistors and most were plastic cased. The best reminder of the vintage of this tuner is that all indicators are incandescent lamps, not one LED. Most poorly designed FM tuners had AFC but this Fisher TFM-1000 HAS NO AFC and doesn’t need it. it was in my cold shop 50F and in my office at 75F the dial didn’t have to be moved. Even back in the early ‘60s it was possi-ble to make a rock stable LO with tran-sistors. And I’ll tell you, digital tuners are a pain in the ass to do surfing, ana-log is the only way a FM tuner needs to be. Once I straightened the dial pointer, which has a little incandescent bulb at the end of the pointer the dial was nuts-on perfect. The amazing thing is the lack of distor-tion and noise in the stereo decoder, the 38kHz that drives the Shockey diode switching was a perfect square wave with a few nanoseconds rise time. You need to listen to one of these analog FM tuners like this TFM-1000 and you’ll give up those digital dogs. ~ RM A comment from my friend Jim Wood: I made a posting not long ago on the bNet group, went like this:

As an employer of tech-nical people, I find that many of today's gradu-ate 'electrical engineers' can write code like there's no tomorrow, but couldn't build a crystal set if their life depended on it. Our fascination with digital technology has relegated what we knew as "electronics" to ones and zeros, with ze-roes seemingly the dom-inant value. A somewhat jaded opin-ion perhaps, and a bit

tongue-in-cheek, of course. But already we are finding our ana-log world suffering in some aspects of performance and quality because it has become easier and cheaper to do things digitally, often compromising the high stand-ards we strove to attain when bound by inferior analog ways of doing things. Jim Wood INOVONICS

Five

Thanks. Harold Payn

Dear Harold, The antenna couplers were used gen-erally with regen radi-os, some-times with crystal de-tector radi-os. The pri-mary func-tion is to provide fair-ly high Q tuned circuit that was connected to the long wire anten-na and the second coil couple out the wanted signal. The outer tuned circuit used the stray capacitance of the wire turns to form a tuned cir-cuit, that would cover the frequen-cies of the broadcast band used even in 1910. The second coil was not in-tended to be tuned circuit but used to couple incoming RF from the antenna into the regen receiver or crystal detector. The second coil was moved in or out to vary the cou-pling between the two coils. they were inductively coupled where when the second coil was full insert-ed, maximum voltage transfer took

place. In the case of regen receiver the wanted broadcast signal would be tuned with the first or outer coil by moving the sliding contact and the coupling varied until regen receiver started detecting the wanted signal.

~R. Majestic

Six

Yet another interesting tuning

scheme - Zenith-built Auto Radio late

1940s

The venerable Zenith Radio Corpora-

tion built several different 6-volt vibra-

tor-power-supply automobile radios in

the late 1940s. The most commonly

seen ones were for Mercury cars, oc-

casionally seen are those for Hudson

cars. These two

units used essen-

tially the same

chassis and preset

tuning scheme but

with different face-

plates. These units

do show up on

eBay, and some

folks refer to them

as "Wonderbar"

sets, but they are

not. A true Wonderbar (General Mo-

tors United Delco trademark; FoMoCo

and MoPar called them "Town &

Country") seeks to the next available

strong-enough signal as determined

by the sensitivity control (Delco) or for

the other makes, whether you pressed

the TOWN button (only stronger sig-

nals) or the COUNTRY button (all lis-

tenable signals). These Zenith sets do

not seek at all; pressing the selector

button merely advances the radio to

the next preset, which was previously

set to the desired station by a human.

The mechanism consists of the four

inductively-tuned coils (antenna, RF

amplifier input, local

oscillator, converter

input) whose slugs

are attached to a

spring-loaded arma-

ture operated by a

large solenoid which

draws the slugs back

to their "most in-

serted" position

(i.e., lowest frequen-

cy) and also oper-

ates a ratchet stepper mechanism ad-

vancing a drum with six threaded rods,

each of which has a threaded "dog" on

it, to its next rotary position. The

"dog" will determine how far forward

the armature returns when the sole-

Yet another interesting tuning scheme by Les Davidson

noid is de-energized, thus establishing

the "preset" station tuning (and mov-

ing the mechanically linked dial point-

er accordingly). The "preset" tuning

human setup is accomplished by pull-

ing out the tuning knob which then

locks in place and engages a gear train

to turn the currently selected thread-

ed rod on the drum, thus enabling the

user to set a station by causing that

particular rod's dog to move to the

appropriate "depth" along the rod.

When the aforementioned solenoid is

energized by the next press of the se-

lector button, it releases the tuning

knob to the freewheeling position so

the user cannot accidentally change

one of the presets. The solenoid also

activates a muting switch such that

the listener does not annoyingly hear

the mechanism tuning down and then

back up the dial to the preset frequen-

cy during its operation. It is hard to

see in the photos, but the six threaded

rods on the drum have two different

thread pitches: those corresponding

to the five actual "presets" 1-2-3-4-5

have a finer thread to permit more

precise tuning of the preset, and the

sixth one corresponding to the "M" or

"manual" position has a coarser

thread to make tuning up and down

the dial quicker. Clever! Any preset

(or manual) can cover the entire band,

not just a small portion of it, and there

is no restriction on ascending or de-

scending frequency order either. The

solenoid draws about eight amps

when activated (in addition to the ap-

proximately four amps drawn by the

radio itself); testing these sets re-

quires a rather stout 6-volt power

source!

~LD

Seven

Eight

The New Mexico Radio Collectors Club is a non-profit organization founded in 1994 in order to enhance the enjoyment of collecting and preservation of radios for all its members.

NMRCC meets the second Sunday of the month at The Quelab at 680 Haines Ave NW , Albuquerque NM Tailgate sale at 1:00PM meetings start at 2:00 pm. Visitors Always Welcomed.

NMRCC NEWSLETTER

THIS PUBLICATION IS THE MONTHLY NEWSLETTER OF THE NEW

MEXICO RADIO COLLECTORS CLUB. INPUT FROM ALL MEMBERS ARE SOLICITED AND WELCOME ON 20TH OF THE PRECEDING

MONTH. RICHARD MAJESTIC PRO-TEMP NEWSLETTER EDITOR, SEND ALL SUBMISSIONS IN WORD FORMAT, PICTURES IN *.JPG

FORMAT TO: RMAJESTIC@MSN.COM

N E W M E X I C O R A D I O

C O L L E C T O R S C L U B

New Mexico Radio Collectors Club Richard Majestic (Membership inquiries)

5460 Superstition Drive Las Cruces NM 88011

E-Mail: ronmonty@comcast.net Phone: 505 281-5067

E-Mail: rmajestic@msn.com Phone: 575 521-0018

FOR INFORMATION CHECK THE INTERNET

http://www.newmexicoradiocollectorsclub.com/

USPS Stamp