277
Item nr.
Battery set for home use.
| Production | England, 1947. |
|---|---|
| Bands | MW, SW. |
| Tubes | TP25 (converter), VP23 (IF amp), HL23DD (detector and pre-amp), PEN25 (output). |
| Cabinet | Wood. Size 43x33x19 cm. Weight 6 kg. |
| Power | Batt 2V and 90V. |
| Obtained | 4/2006 from Maarten Lemmens. |
|---|---|
| Condition | 5. |
| Disposed | Sold 10/2013. |
| Sound sample | PLAY SOUND A fragment of the EO radio show De muzikale fruitmand should of course not miss from this web site. Mrs Stien Hossink-Brink from Heemsen and her family will have no problem to date the fragment! |
Usually I find battery sets a bit more interesting than mains sets, and I could buy this one for a very reasonable price. The state of the woodwork was not very good, as you can see on the right. The dial protection glass was so dirty that it was not possible to read the dial.
It might not be obvious to everybody, but it is easy to recognize the Decca as a battery set, even from the front appearance. As you see on the inside picture below, under the chassis there is a large space for batteries, and one can see from the outside that the radio buttons, loudspeaker and dial are placed quite high compared to mains powered radios.
It had an unreadable stamp on top. If anybody knows what is written here and what the purpose of it was, please let me know. Perhaps a tax stamp?
Inside the radio I found an old rusty transformer and a 12V/1Amp rectifier. Perhaps this was used for charging the lead accumulator? I didn't have the courage yet to try and plug it in. My repair started with a battle agains spiders, mouse droppings and other biological artefacts that I happily wish to find a place in a forest, but not in any of my radios.
I pulled the chassis, waved a vacuum cleaner over the inside, and sanded and refinished the set with water based lacquor. Three layers were sufficient, and after that I polished the set with Commandant.
With the cabinet looking satisfactorily, I turned attention to the chassis and found out that the set has a SW band! The output transformer is mounted on the speaker so you cannot see it here. I replaced all of the paper wax capacitors, and soldered a 2xAA battery holder for the filament supply in series with two resistors of 0.33 Ohm. In this way, the filaments can be supplied by 2 NiMH rechargable penlight batteries.
It took me some time to get the radio to work, and even to get current through the output tube! Because battery radios do not have an automatic, but a fixed negative voltage on the control grid of the output tube, it is possible that this tube becomes cut off completely and this was the case. Reducing the resistor in the negative battery lead reduced the negative bias, and brought sound to the radio.
Later the set stopped working again, so it is currently not working.