Tenma Signal Generator Mod and Demo

okay guys a little video here um test equipment video on the bench I have a Tenma if that's how you pronounce it 72- 585 RF signal generator this was my very one of my first signal generators um I got and I bought it brand new through a company called MCM Electronics um there are about three or four different places that sell this uh you can get it under different names uh B and K precision and a couple other companies have rebranded this uh model and they have different model numbers but basically this is a very common out there you can get them on eBay you can get them like I said here in the United States you can get them in MCM or nework uh several different vendors but if you do a search for for it you'll see it out there um the reason I've gotten away from using this I really let's talk about what I like about it number one it is extremely simple when you look at this thing if you're just getting into the Hobby and you don't want to fiddle around with some of the older tube type signal generators like the io 324 or you know those kinds of things this is a really good solid state solution as you you can see on the oscilloscope it has a very clean sine wave for RF um and it has all the basic things you would need to work at least on am radios uh for instance you have a range all the way from 100 kerz all the way up to 150 megahertz so that's a pretty broad range you can actually do a unmodulated carrier um in the FM broadcast band if you want you know between 88 and 108 megacycles now certainly not going to be you know it's not going to be a sweep signal and it's not going to be a modulated signal for FM but you can use the carrier to set up some parts of lower-end FM radios um you have an external modulation input and you can put different signals and modulate the uh RF however you want which which is another option so then if you get a I would imagine I've never tried this but if you get one of those really lowcost online sweep generators you know arbitrary function generators like a low frequency one that'll only go up you know a couple megahertz those can be had on eBay pretty inexpensively and you could modulate this signal and get all kinds of different modulated um carriers within that you know 100 kilohertz to 150 MHz bandwidth now on harmonics technically this thing should be able to on on this setting go from 96 to 450 megahertz on harmonics okay so this is all good stuff you have a highend low attenuation and you have a fine adjustment for the output as you can see on the scope those are all good things now what are some of and and you have an external Crystal so you could put a a resonant crystal in there and set it to Crystal oscillator and you'll have a uh you know you'll have a really rock solid signal at that frequency of the crystal so lots of options with this thing for being such a low-end unit now couple of the bad things why did I stop using it well first of all when you're working with f when you're working with RF especially with radios a lot of times you're using especially with these am radios like a tube set or even a a you know a transistor set that you're working you're usually setting your if and everything with a minimum signal the problem with the minimum signal is you really can't hook up test equipment to measure the frequency so if I wanted to put a frequency counter on this I couldn't at load signal um now why would I want to do that I can just set the dial gauge well here's the thing if you look right here I don't know if you can see let me try to just temporarily Zoom you in on the scope if you look what it's saying right here I don't know if can you see that I hope right there right here is what we're interested in you can see that I have a 1.5 mahz RF sign wave on there right now let me back you back out now if you look on the dial scale right here is 1.5 mahz you see where the pointer is it's not on 1.5 and what you're going to find out is all across the scale it's not really super accurate and because of that you have to use x external test equipment to set the frequency accurately on this now if you don't really care if you're just trying to set up a rough area and tune to it this is good enough but what if you want to set up an if and you want it to be precisely 455 KZ okay so if I go down to here and I go to set it to 455 this little arrow if you look right here there's a little tiny Arrow there if you set this on there that's supposed to be 455 khz exactly okay and if you look at the scope you can see it's 450 to 451 all right um so it's not that accurate okay now some people will say well if you set it up at that it'll work you know and that's true to an extent but if you really want want to get accurate with things um an if is a tune circuit and it's designed around the the IF frequency it was designed for and if it's 455 khz you really want it as close to 455 as you can get it so that kind of rendered this thing hard to use um anytime you put anything on this output you you can affect things so you really don't want anything other than your device connected to this um so what do we do you know I I don't want to have a scope on it all the time when I'm trying to set my frequency and again like I said when you start going to low range minimum you know for RF you can see that very quickly let me get my get this thing to trigger you can see very quickly that you know the signal starts getting unstable at low frequencies or I mean at the low amplitudes you can see how noisy and kind of unstable it gets so even using your oscilloscope to measure it is not real easy and this is a dag on good scope this is a very good tectronics topof the line you know a digital phosphor scope and even with it you can see not that pretty when you're doing minimum output you know like you would when you're setting the sensitivity of a radio so what does that mean for all of us well here's why I'm doing all this um number one I don't need this I have other test equipment but it is nice to have a simple device like this if it were more accurate to just use it I don't like turning on my high-end expensive equipment um for something that I could do with a simple generator like this um and also I think this is a good opportunity to share a video with you guys um how to get into the hobby with some lower-end equipment but giving it a little bit of higher end features so let's go to our next little thing if you go online you can purchase one of these from eBay or Amazon or any other place it's just a frequency counter now this frequency counter is a cheap one this was like 10 bucks and if you look I'm going to turn on some more lights here we're going to get a little bit of glare on the scope but we don't need that right now but if we we look here this is only good for as you could see right down here it's only good for about 75 megahertz okay so it it won't measure the frequency all the way up of what this thing can do okay but anything in the broadcast am bands or the shortwave band so if you're going to do a shortwave radio or you're going to do an AM radio you're going to get into the just get into this this will work very very well at measuring the frequency now I tested this up against you know a really accurate um RF signal source and this thing was absolutely 100% dead accurate on it was on so it works very very well um all you need is you know a 9volt power signal and then you just plug a BNC connector into it and boom it reads the signal so let's do that let's hook this up I'm going to hook this up to some power and we'll be right back okay so basically I have this hooked up to 9 volts and I just have it plugged directly in to the signal generator as we can see all right and when I shut the light out here to get rid of the glare because this needs a t a tinted glass window over it to be able to see the numbers properly that's why you probably aren't seeing them I'm not even having a very good time seeing them but if we shut the lights off um you can see that uh let me see if I can get a little bit of background light to help out illuminate this a little bit bit there does that help any little bit okay so if you look that's pretty much 450 was pretty much what our scope was originally reading all right and as we adjust it you can see we can set it very accurately if we want there we go 455 okay and I can really dial it down now a little thing about how this one works okay if you notice this little cursor is blinking here see the little dot when it's blinking when it's flashing fast that means that it's measuring kilohertz not megahertz now if I take this up see how it is not flashing there's the decimal point that means it's megahertz so that's how it differentiates between measuring kilohertz and megahertz so let me go back down 455 and see how it's flashing go back up to megahertz not flashing and you can see it's it's five digits so you get some pretty good resolution on this thing um for the most part so there we go so 455 kohtz and even though the if you look at the the bezel it's not really at 455 um it's not on the little arrow but it's close so the dial scale is not perfect on this thing and now we have a solution for the dial scale now here's we're going where we're going to run into problems I have the attenuation set to maximum and if I turn the signal down okay like you're going to use for testing your radio all of a sudden as you turn this thing it doesn't work properly okay so you can see it kind of gets really kind of jittery now just to show you even though it's not reading right now if I unplug this and I move it to my scope there is in fact a signal there now it's very small it's only uh 43 molts Peak to Peak but you got to understand when you're looking at an RF signal you want it to be very very low like that you don't want it to overpower your um your AGC circuit okay so again perfect signal I'm not touching anything on the signal generator I go back over to here and I plug it into here and as you can see I just get garbage now if I turn this amplitude up far enough it'll eventually start to read and the higher the frequency you get the more critical that gets so if I go to here and I go down it'll drop off even faster so this was almost a solution I'm going to turn the lights back on so it's almost a solution for this but not perfect so what are we going to do okay so what I'm going to do is a couple of things number one I don't want to put a t piece in here with my output because I don't want anything here affecting my output so I want to put an external connector on the back to be able to connect an external frequency counter such as this one that's number one number two what we want to do is let's look at the schematic for a minute so if we look here you see that okay so if we look here right here is your RF output and if you trace it back you have a capacitive decoupler here you have a resistive divider Network that is for high and low um output so you have a little padding circuit there and then you have an attenuator which is just a pot that goes to ground but right here this transistor okay on the emitter of this trans this npn transistor you actually have your output right here now what we want to do is normally we would just tap off of this to go into the frequency counter and probably we could probably just take a capacitor and to decouple and come off of this and go to that um BN to a BNC connector and that will feed at full output all the time that will feed our frequency counter now if the frequency counter has a high enough input impedance it probably won't affect any of this at all and it'll just be like it's not even there so we will have to do a little bit of experimenting to see if we can just get away with that and that's what I'm hoping for if not I do have a plan B okay so plan B is a circuit called a high impedance buffer now what is a buffer a buffer is just a simple little circuit that kind of decouples a signal from another device okay so it's kind of an intermediary thing and what it's supposed to do is it will present a very high impedance to the signal so it doesn't attenuate or affect the signal okay and then the output no matter what load you put on the output it's not going to affect the input of this circuit so what do we mean by this well if you take a look right here is a very simple circuit as an example where we're using a jat okay a j fat is a very high impedance semiconductor okay and basically we're putting a decoupling capacitor we're going into the input of the J fat with a 10 mega ohm kind of bleeder resistor there okay and then we're coming out of the jfet and we're amplifying that signal a little bit with an RF transistor now what's the one thing if you read the article on this the one thing that he did the gentleman did that that designed this when they did this was this is actually a germanium transistor okay there's two types of transistor material there's germanium and silicon silicon is the type you see today all right um what's the difference well the main difference is the voltage drop across the p&n junction of a semiconductor if it's germanium your voltage drop is much lower it's you know around 3 10 of a volt or 0.3 volts whereas on a silicon transistor it's anywhere from 6 to7 volt drop okay so the operating conditions of the of geranium versus silicon are a little bit different germanium is kind of outdated nobody uses it anymore but for this application it's actually works really really well so um I do have if we need to breadboard this and see if we can mock this up I do have an old geranium trans RF transistor and I do have a little uh J fet it's probably not the same one as this but it should work again this circuit was designed to work up into you know High the high VHF low UHF frequencies um these components here will only work well within the 75 mahz that that this frequency counter will be working in and possibly even higher than that clear up into the FM broadcast band so again we're going to try just a decoupling capacitor first if that doesn't work we're going to put this buffer signal on there um this or this little buffer circuit so that's our little project for today and if this works then maybe that'll be a little inspiration for all of you out there that are thinking of getting into radio uh to be able to make your own test setup you can do a lot with this once we get this mocked up you'll see that you can using these modulation ports you can do an awful lot with this s signal generator once you get it to a point where you get an accurate signal output um and you're going to find out even on the tube type ones if you have an IO 324 or a uh Heath kit sg8 a lot of those old ones you can find them sometimes very inexpensively at flea markets or on eBay or online but they all have one thing in common and that is the dial scale is never super accurate and if you need something to be accurate you need a way to be able to monitor it as you're adjusting it it's a it's really a pain to hook up an oscilloscope with frequency measurement or try to hook up a frequency counter and get it to to read and all the very difficult but if you have a separate frequency counter output it'll make all the difference in the world um of how useful this device becomes like I said brand new these can be bought I've seen them as cheap as $150 brand new which I think is not a bad price for a solid state um frequency generator that goes up to this you know this high of a frequency um so that's where we're at so let's get this thing cracked open and see what's inside let's look at some schematics and see what our options are all right so we got this apart and as you can tell there's not much going on in here really you have your coils with your band select you got basically the oscillator and you know the input outputs right here um your tuning capacitor and that's really it and this side is your power supply now I did a little bit of measuring and if you notice right here are those two dodes coming from the little Transformer and we can see that right here and when I measure this point right here I'm getting about 25 volts DC now our frequency counter again needs a Power Range somewhere from 7 to 9 volts so I need about 9 volts DC for this to work right and I just so happen to have some of these these little Buck converters little DC todc converter power supplies you can buy these online um eBay and Amazon and bang good and all those companies have them and they're very inexpensive they're only a couple of dollars like $2 each and what they do is we can put our 25 volts in this can take up to 30 volts input and we can crank it down to about our nine volts right here and what I'm going to do is conveniently there is a pad let me Zoom you in there is a pad right here this Center pad is our 25 volts it goes directly to the output of our dodes and then and one of these is our ground this is all our ground bus along here so I'm going to tack on my input wires to this pad here and to one of the ground pads here and I've already conveniently mounted a couple of standoff posts right up here so that this will sit right here now this is out of the way I don't think it's going to interfere in an RF man manner these do oscillate a little bit so they could put off some noise I'll see I can make a little aluminum Shield if we really really need it but I highly doubt it's going to affect anything and uh here's going to be our outputs and what I intend to do is I have a bunch of these in stock uh just the little power jack and a little power plug like that and I'm going to connect that to this and mount that to the chassis and then I have a BNC Jack right here and I have a little piece of coax I'm going to use and I'm going to tap in right at this transistor here sorry right at the transistor okay so right in this area is where we're going to look for our uh signal out I'm probably going to pick it off right here on this pot and I'm just going to use an isolation capacitor I'm probably going to use a small one um you know they're using right here looks like a 0 I don't know what that is what's that say to you 03 05 something like that and I'm going to use like 8.01 cuz we don't really need uh too much to get out of there so 01 should do fine I would imagine um again I'm going to mock this up before I solder everything but um I'll get this power put in first so that's where we are when I get this put together a little further we'll be back okay as you can see I have a little coupling cap here connected to the potenti iometer input and uh I just mounted this terminal strip right on this convenient ground Tab and these two tabs is where we're going to come off with our uh coax to go to the BNC connector and I tested it out and my signal stays nice and strong all the way through all the adjustments so turn this on you can see the little blue light there for the little uh 9volt power supply we put in and when we look up here here on the oscilloscope can you all see that see here what we're in the way get all this stuff out of the way here we go okay my mother's hold on okay so we can see and I will flip through all of the frequency bandwidths and my scope just fell off there we go and you can see plenty of signal all the way to the max okay so let's get this connected up you can see we have our two connectors hooked up in there and there they are on the back so let's get this put together and see what it does okay our project is complete and I mounted it in a little box here as you can see I'll turn the lights on a little better here in a little bit and you can see it's uh working very well and there's our see now when we want our 455 we can dial right in you can see to 455 khz you could see how touchy this adjustment is and you could see how hard it would be to get this by just looking at that dial so that makes this a lot uh more useful piece of test equipment and there you have it so maybe we'll get a radio out if we can and do a couple little tests that uh just some basic things um for all of you who are really experienced with this this is just review you might want to just kind of skip through this but for those of you who are new to the Hobby um maybe we can look at how we use one of these on a radio so let's get some things set up here and take a look but uh before we do that turn our lights back on and I'll just show you what I did if you look here I just got a plastic Project Box and I basically put a couple of standoffs back here drilled a couple holes for the wires and then just mounted it in there and then I just double stick taped it right to the top and as you can see there's our connectors on the back okay okay and for those of you who are wondering about cookie here she is say hi cookie you say hi hi what you going to talk H hey cookie no all right well there she is and of course we can't leave Bella out of this come here Bella come on Pop hi baby good girl can you sit can you sit no cuz you're on you're on the camera sit good girl good girl all right say hi to everybody okay okay so we have a little uh radio here it's an old Sentinal all americ 5 vacuum tube radio you can see it's been restored inside but the radio's really hammered up pretty bad the case on it was really damaged um but it's such a good performing little radio for what it is um I just kind of keep it around for test purposes so as you can see it's all plugged in and turned on right now and you can see the 1 2 3 4 five tubes that's why they're called All American fives and we're going to do a couple little tests um again this is for this is for the beginners um if you know if you're really experienced with radio this is not going to be much of any learning experience but those of you new to the sport here um maybe you'll find this interesting so now that you have a decent piece of test equipment let's see what kind of things we can do with this all right now the first thing we have to talk about is safety um make sure whenever you work on this stuff it's high voltage you can get severely injured or even killed um if you come in contact with the power in here there's high voltages and they're very dangerous so if you're not comfortable working around high voltages and you don't understand how to work around them then stop and learn about that first remember you are doing this at your own risk and if you get injured you know uh I can't be held responsible for that so do this at your own risk now one one thing when you work with these this is called a hot chassis radio the reason it's called hot chassis is because the plug is connected to this chassis on one end so one end of this cord is connected to this chassis and depending how you plug it in this chassis could be set on the hot side of your AC line so if you touch this radio any part of metal part of this radio and you touch something that's ground you're going to get a severe shock so anytime you work on these types of radios always always always this should be the very first investment you make if you're going to work on old radios get yourself a isolation Transformer the basically in this metal box is nothing but a Transformer a one toone Transformer that basically has a primary winding and a secondary winding that do not touch one another physically and they transfer the power from your incoming line to the radio without any Electrical Connection in between so what that does is that isolates your AC line from your radio if you should accidentally come in contact with the chassis of the radio and something that's grounded you will not get shocked because the Transformer isolates still isolates it from the ground now that being said you still can get shocked in the radio by completing the circuit inside the radio so if you touch something like the chassis and then you touch something that's hot in this radio you're still going to get shocked okay but the isolation Transformer prevents you from having a ground Loop between the radio and you when you touch the radio and touch something that's Earth ground okay I hope that makes sense to you all so again one of your first things when you're going to work on these get an isolation Transformer in my previous videos I think a couple times we talk about that and I show them to you so uh make sure you understand that now we have this all connected and warmed up and as you can hear we have some sound hear that and it's picking up our station here all the noises okay now take a look up here at this okay at our frequency watch as I move it do you hear that sound hear how the sound goes away here how it comes back now look at the frequency it goes away now it's gone you hear that okay let's talk about that for a minute what we were creating there was called a a beat frequency be a t why do we call that well inside a superrod radio okay you basically take you have two capacitors there one is your antenna tuning capacitor the other one is called your oscillator and what your oscillator does is it will oscillate at a frequency that is about in this case 4 55 khz off higher or lower than the the actual antenna tuned frequency by add by subtracting those apart the difference is always going to be the 455 khz difference okay we call that our intermediate frequency now I'm not doing a lesson on radios here right now we're just going to I'm just giving you a brief synopsis so you understand what we're looking at so the bottom line is if I feed 455 kerz into this radio it should pass right through the the antenna and it should sync up with that 455 khz difference between these two oscillators here the antenna and the local oscillator and it should because it's they sync up I should be able to put a tone okay so that modulated tone you hear it hear that sound and you can hear there's the tone now as you notice I'm really not connecting any physical wires okay in behind here is your antenna this is the bar antenna and all I'm doing is bringing this little Loop of wire in close proximity to the antenna see that now all I have is just a BNC cable with some alligator clips on the end crocodile Clips if you want to call them that and I just have a couple of turns of just solid plain solid wire taped together to make a little Loop okay we call this just a loop radiator and and by placing it in proximity of the antenna I am actually making a mini radio station and I'm transmitting on 455 khz it's supposed to be and a modulation of 1 kerz okay so that simulates music or or sound into the radio and that's what you're hearing with that that's a 1 khz Tone If I turn off the modulation then I just have a plain old carrier signal now if I turn that off see that and you start hearing radio stations you hear that okay if I turn it [Music] up see okay now again I said 455 khz but look where it's at okay now Watch What Happens here it get higher and I watch me go [Music] down did you hear that squeal go away there's the squeal now it's gone Now look up here at our frequency that is what we call Z beat when when the two frequencies the frequency in this and the frequency in the local oscillator here or the the intermediate frequency the if are equal they're synced up so you don't hear any difference between those two signals beating against one another and making a tone so listen no sound but when I get off of my zero beat hear that now what am I doing why am I doing all this why am I wasting so much time on it well what what I'm showing you is an easy way to tell with your signal generator if your IF frequency is properly calibrated okay technically if this were done correctly at 455 khz we should see that zero beat but if you look on this radio it's at 46.69 or 46.7 see if we go to 455 right about there's 454 point right pretty close to 455 right there okay and as you can see it's not zero Beed okay so in this case we would want to adjust our intermediate frequency so we're going to adjust these little cans to get rid of that sound okay or better yet we're going to do it the way that they show you in the in the instructions okay so if you don't have any way of putting modulation putting a tone on that frequency okay on that carrier frequency then we could adjust it this way all right hold on a second okay I got a tweaker out here so so this is out of whack now if we turn on our modulation there's your sound you want to turn it down till it starts getting real staticky get back up to 455 I bumped it okay there you want to set your signal till it's nice and quiet or till it's nice and uh way down just barely picking up the signal okay see that and then and if you look at our meter okay and watch what happens now here how it's getting louder and watch the meter very hard to peek it then you go to this one let me get a different tweaker out okay let's try this one watch the meter there you go okay that's enough of that noise huh and what we're doing is we're zeroing this in to get a quieter spot there there we go and right there hear it as we go past it and we go past it again right there and there you go now let me show you what I was doing with this meter here sorry about the noise but we were adjusting for the peak on the meter see that right like that okay there you have it so that's our first thing okay so now that we know that we have an accurate frequency on here we were able to accurately set this to these two if coils to 455 khz now whenever you do an alignment on an old radio like this almost all of them are going to work the same way now some of the really old ones have really odd um intermediate frequencies and I suggest you read up on superrod um or look at some of my other videos talking about some of that but uh you're always going to start out by adjusting your if once you do that you can hear that then you're going to want to do for your you know for your dial and what's that's going to mean is you're going to do something at the top of the dial and something at the bottom of the dial so for instance and this is how you set your dial accur now on this radio we obviously don't have a pointer for our dial so we can't really do it but essentially what you're going to do is you're going to go all the way to one end you know near 1,600 khz or 1.6 MHz and you're going to move this up to 1.6 mahz let's say right there you can see where we're set and when we tune up wide [Music] open you see there so I'm tuning with the capacitor open that should be right on 1.6 mahz and when you get it when you set the dial to 1.6 MHz and you set your oscill your uh signal generator to 1.6 MHz then you're going to use your little adjusters here for your oscillators to trim it in right at 1600 what'll happen is sometimes if you tune the dial to 1.5 mahz and you're picking up 1.6 MHz that means your your dial accuracy is set wrong and so in order to adjust that you're adjusting these two little trimmers on these capacitors down here so if I kind of Zoom you in here you have these little tiny screws those are actually little capacitors there's a little piece of spring steel like copper with some micia little piece of micia behind there and when you turn that it actually adds or subtracts a wee little bit of capacitance to these two capacitors here and what that does is that lets you exactly have the dial set to 1.6 mahz and then have have you actually tuning 1.6 MHz so the dial matches the station okay so for instance if you're tuning in a station that you know is Radio 790 let's say but you're up around 820 and Tuning In Radio 790 on 820 you know that your dial is set wrong so that would be these little screws here one of them you use you set at a high frequency then you would go back over to here and you would change your band and we would take it maybe to 520 or five let's say 525 okay somewhere around 525 and then you would take and tune your dial down here see there and you hear that sound I'm picking up we're actually picking up some noise from an electronic device on my bench most likely this signal generator up here you see how this little LED flashes it's like your your power indicator that you know this is the power switch why they would do this for a signal generator is beyond me this is is not my favorite syndrome generator it's generates more crap and more noise I can't do any radio work with this thing plugged in I have to unplug it and get rid of it um but you can see that's you see how that flashes on and off and it kind of does it in step with that sound okay that's what you're picking up it's pretty bad or maybe it's this nope so anyway ignore the little beeping and then you would go ahead and you would adjust this other screw over here I'm jumping all over the place on this video guys I'm sorry okay so basically aligning a an AM radio like this is as simple as that okay you set your if go to 4 55 khz take a little Loop of antenna here little Loop wire place it in proximity of your antenna to couple it up then you go in and you adjust your your first and second if okay most of these radios have two ifs some of them have one some of them have three it depends on the radio some of the higher quality radios even have an RF section um that will boost the antenna signal before it turns it into an if signal um those will usually have an extra tube you'll see a sixth tube in there but anyhow we're not going to get into that most of them are like this most of the little radios you get on you know in the flea market or whatever will be these all American fives and they'll have your two if cans and your two little trimmers on your main Capa on your tuning capacitor and you always start with your if first your 455 khz then you set the high scale of the dial and the low scale of the dial and once you get those four settings adjusted your your radio is calibrated that's all there is to it and you can tune by ear as you heard when you when you do get these things on frequency your modulation signal your one you know 1 khz or 400 Herz whichever tone your signal generator makes this one does a 1 khz tone it'll get louder or you can go across the speaker like I did with this you know with the with the little vtvm meter get yourself a cheap vtvm on you on a flea market or whatever and you can adjust using the needle to Peak it this is more accurate but you have to have the radio turned up loud enough to deflect the meter now there is ways that you can go into the Circuit of the radio down by the um where the AGC is and you can pick off the signal be you know before it goes into the speaker so you can have the speaker turned down but I'm not going to show you how to do that today that's too much to talk about right now though for the sake of Simplicity you go across your speaker terminals with your AC vtvm meter use your little needle to peek out like we did adjust your two ifs first if second if and then go change your frequency on here to 1.4 1.5 mahz 1.6 something like that adjust that the first trimmer and then go down to 520 khz or 600 khz and tune that in and then adjust that the other adjuster and that's it simple as that there's nothing to it so and you can see I did all the alignment of the radio from the top in other words in this particular case I never even had to take the bottom of the radio off okay and so some of them may have more than one uh coil they may have a primary side and a secondary side at which case you may have another one of these Adjusters in the bottom of this little coil here okay and that you would reach in from the bottom of the chass and you would adjust both of them and then both of these okay so just depends on the radio and like I said it's usually a little onepage instruction if you get the manual like from Nostalgia a.com or somebody like that and you get the uh schematics and the adjustment instructions it's one page and it's it'll tell you how to do it it's very simple so I hope that helps you guys out I know that uh this is a nice nice nice little piece of test equipment now I'll probably use it um you know you've all seen me use the HP you know 8657 up here and uh I really like it it's super accurate it does a lot of things but I really don't like using expensive test equipment for little things like this if I don't really need to um when I could just fire up this little thing and dial it in and use it and now that I have a good frequency counter we're good I'll be able to use it more often so now that this thing's tuned in I mean I'm in the basement of my house just to give you a little idea and I'm at the bottom of a hill and even with that I can pick up some stations what a great game that is going around there's that sound [Music] [Music] again so you get an idea cushion can be used to Grant your son who got a chance to play state champion ship with his high school team and it it it begs the question for me so there you go all nice and tuned in and as you can see it was off a little bit um the if was off a we little bit so that that got it tuned right in just as simple as that so I hope that was uh I know this was a kind of a long video for a lot of nothing so for those of you who were bored and wanted to kill some time there you go um for the rest of you that uh kind of suffered through this whole thing uh hopefully we get something more interesting coming up here pretty soon I really need to do that Pioneer um sx150 um I know I've done a video on one of those before the video turned out real choppy uh what I'm probably going to do is I'll probably bring this other SX 1050 up on the bench I'll do a preliminary video on it and I'll ask you all if you want to see the whole thing uh the whole restoration I'm going to get into pretty deep detail on it and uh if you're interested in seeing another step by step of yet another piece of pioneer gear I don't know why it's turning out this way but just seems like all I've had lately is Pioneer but uh I'll be happy to go through all that um if you're uh not interested in that my my feelings won't be hurt I understand and uh I'll just do it off camera and uh when I come back I'll have something else up on a bench so uh you all have yourselves a great day and uh thanks for coming along on this it was a lot of fun uh I'm really kind of surprised at this little frequency counter how well it works right up then I did take it right up to 75 megahertz and it looked really good so uh I highly recommend it um again if you search eBay for uh frequency counter um or frequency counter module this will come right about a 100 of these will pop up and they're cheap they're like all 10 15 bucks uh American and uh really all you need is a 9vt source and a BNC connector and you know a wire to plug in here and it's ready to go right out of the box I think you can also buy these in kit form for a dollar or two cheaper if you want to solder up the parts and practice on that um I got mine preassembled and uh I guess that's all there is to this uh I am probably going to get some some tinted film to put over here to make this easier to read um in the future but other than that this is going up on the bench and it'll be a nice quick little test thing that I can use uh for working on these little radios so thanks again and uh we'll catch you on the next one

Channel: xraytonyb

Views: 57,053

Keywords: electronics, vintage electronics, woodworking, repairs, stereo, restore, restoration, vacuum, tube, amplifier, radio, alignment, calibration

Id: 3Mgg8wvyDHw

Length: 61min 54sec (3714 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2017