15 Mar
2013
15 Mar
'13
9:28 p.m.
On 3/15/2013 4:05 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 03/15/2013 01:09 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Anyone else remeember the 0XZ4 rectifier? Common is such car radios.
And noisy (in the RF sense) as the dickens. Ran very hot, too. It had
a half-wave cousin, the OY3 (IIRC).
B-supplies for auto radios seemed to come in a couple of flavors--gas
cold-cathode rectifier, traditional hot-cathode rectifier, and
synchronous vibrator rectifier--as well as an occasional plug-in
semiconductor replacement for the miserable OZ4. I don't recall
seeing a selenium rectifier in such rigs, however.
The radio in my Nash Metropolitan uses a vibrator rectifier. It was a
lost cause and when I rebuilt it I replaced the rectifier with a solid
state replacement.
On the subject of tube radios, I picked up an RCA Victor BP-10 awhile
back; this is a portable from about 1940 and it's actually pretty darn
tiny for a tube-based unit. (And it runs off a 63.5V B battery (#467)
and one D-sized 1.5V battery. Amazingly you can still buy the 63.5V
batteries new...). Anyway, I bring it up because aside from its small
form factor it has one other attribute I've never seen in a tube radio
-- it starts playing almost immediately (within a second) of turning it
on and the tubes never seem to get warm at all. All the other tube
units I've ever seen take 10-20 seconds to warm up first. Makes me
wonder a) what's special about this unit and b) why other units didn't
do the same -- seems like a pretty useful feature.
Any ideas?
Josh
--Chuck