How I chose the radio

Why did I choose this particular Philco model? The reasoning was not particularly scientific, but in retrospect it turned out to be a very good choice.

I'd spent some time browsing (and drooling over) various old radio galleries, to get a sense for what's available. Roughly speaking, here's my impression about the lay of the land:

• Wood radios vs. plastic radios. As much as some plastic radios are beautiful pieces of Art-Deco inspired art, I just didn't like them as much as the wood radios. Some particular brands of plastic radios, those made of the Catalin brand of plastic material, are extremely sought-after and expensive -- as much as $2000 or more for a radio in good condition!
• Cathedral vs. tombstone vs. console vs. tabletop. The console radios are quite large and unwieldy, so they were out of consideration for me fairly quickly. I was somewhat torn betwen cathedral and tombstone design -- I like them both, however, in the end I decided to go with a cathedral design since I find the design more appealing and timeless. The tabletop radios, while very nice in their own right, didn't quite have the vintage look I enjoyed.

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• Manufacturer: Philco vs. Zenith vs. Motorola vs. RCA vs. Sparton. There is very large number of manufacturers that produced radios in the "golden era", most of them gone today. In the end, I decided to go with a Philco radio because it is one of the best and largest radio producers, they also produced many of their own radio parts (similar to RCA), and I quite liked their designs (the Philco 90, in particular, is considered by some "the" classic cathedral design).
• Last but not least: complexity. Since this was the first radio I'd try to restore, it was important that the electronics weren't too complicated. I definitely wanted a vacuum-tube based radio (as opposed to transistor), and also wanted a radio that was made in the late 20's - early 30's (earlier than that may have meant too much compromise on audio quality, which would have been a problem as I'd actually like to use the radio around the house).

In the end, the Philco 80 turned out to be a surprisingly good choice:

• It's a Philco wooden cathedral design. While by no means the most ornate, it still looks very good and embodies many of the design qualities I like.
• It's very simple electronically. It only has 4 tubes, compared to 7+ tubes for many of the "fancier" models. It has modest energy consumption (46 watts), and it is fairly well documented and understood.
• As it turns out, the Philco 80 Jr. was meant to be one of the cheapest cathedral design radios at the time -- which explains the complexity and power consumption above. The radio was introduced for $18.75, whereas other radios would start at double that.

Depending on how this restoration goes, I may look into a tombstone design next, as there are some very good looking radios in that category as well.

An old project about an old radio

For a while now I have been thinking of getting an old radio and restoring it back to life. The reasons are because I love the look of old radios, it would be a fun electronics project, and a good excuse to learn how more about how radio broadcasting works.

I finally took the plunge a few weeks ago and bought an old Philco 80 Jr from eBay. The radio is in great physical condition, especially for a radio made in 1933:

The internals also looked good (the seller made it clear that the radio was not plugged in and may or may not work upon arrival):

Upon closer inspection, the radio had a number of issues:

• It is missing two tubes: the power pentode (tube 42) and the full-wave rectifier (tube 80).
• The cap connector on one of the oscillators (tube 36) was detached and had come off.
• It had no power plug, and there were two strange wires coming out of the back of the radio.

You can see the real state of radio from this photo I took from my workbench (notice the missing tube sockets, and the broken cap):

Before getting the radio, I'd done some high-level reading about how to restore an old radio, in particular Phil's excellent guide, so I knew roughly what to expect, in particular not to plug it in until I can run a few tests.

One of the things I find amazing about such old radios (besides the fact that they're 80 years old) is the fact that this particular radio may well have played broadcasts from WW2, from the lunar landing, and other momentous times in history. I think there is something incredibly cool about that.

This post will be the first in a series that will document how I'm going to restore this old radio and what I learn along the way. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I will enjoy writing about it!

Lead paint

Lead is a heavy metal with lots of industrial and commercial uses, ranging anywhere from batteries used in cars, to protecting nuclear physicists from radiation. One particularly colorful and sad chapter in the history of this otherwise boring metal is the use of lead in gasoline (tetraethyl lead) to prevent engine knock. Bill Bryson writes about it eloquently in his book A short history of nearly everything.

Another common use of lead is in household paint. The reason? It looks good: paint with lead in it is shiny and pleasing to the eye. It's also quite dangerous and poisonous. Lead also happens to be a neurotoxin, it likes to bind with neurons and prevents the normal formation of synapses, which is particularly bad for young children, who apparently can retain up to 100% of the lead that enters their system (adults, as it turns out, are better at eliminating the bad stuff, only about 20% of the lead that enters an adult body stays, the rest is eliminated).

The most common way for children to be exposed through lead is, you guessed it, household paint. Specifically, in older homes, the lead paint can naturally chip and fall on the floor, where a child can ingest it. One easy solution to this is to paint over the areas with lead paint therefore "trapping" the bad stuff and preventing it from flaking or otherwise getting off the walls. In general, good house keeping (cleaning, vacuuming, and in general maintaining the surfaces whether through washing or painting over) does a lot of good and cheaply.

San Francisco's housing stock is old, some of it built before 1900, and a lot of it built after the earthquake of 1906. There are few modern houses, and even fewer built after lead paint was made illegal. Ironically, the more expensive and "fancy" a house, the more likely it is to have lead paint in it; some of the highest concentration of lead paint in San Francisco is apparently in the fancy mansions of Pacific Heights. Besides paint, which is by far the most common place for lead, another relatively common place is glazing on tiles, for example shower tiles. A good rule of thumb is that -- if the paint or the tiles look nice and shiny, they're probably leaded.

It may be tempting to get very worried about lead paint and decide to "strip" it out. This is not only costly -- it involves sanding most surfaces that can contain lead paint -- but it also frees the stuff in the air and it can become a true nightmare to get it all out.

How would you know if you have lead paint in your house? You can hire someone to test it, or you can even do some of it yourself.

One kind of test involves taking flakes of paint and send them to a lab where they are analyzed. To cover the house, the technician has to take a sample from each wall, or at least each room, since some rooms may have been painted with lead paint, while some weren't. If this sounds like a pain, it is. You can also use a home lead-test kit in area where the paint is exposed. The lead-test kit is basically a "brush" that contains a reactant in it, you brush over the paint, and if there is lead present, it turns red. The test is controversial, and has a false-positive rate, but it can give you some idea.

Another kind of test is using an XRF gun. This gun fires off a stream of high-speed particles which only bounce back when they hit something dense ... like a lead atom. The gun approach is far easier to use since you can just take "readings" from all surfaces you care about and the results are instant.

As a side note, it is remarkable to what extent people have ignored common sense or made bad choices in the name of "looking good".

Repeater on the cheap

The wireless signal in our house has difficulty reaching a few spots. On top of that, the PowerBook's metal shell interferes with the (already weak) signal, and makes it impossible to connect.

One solution is to use a repeater to boost the signal. LinkSys already makes a Range Expander, which seems to do the right thing, but at $80, it costs more than the router itself!

DD-WRT, which I already use for QoS, can also turn a $50 router into a repeater (and more!)

The generic name for this is Linking Routers. At a high-level, there are 4 ways to link two (or more) routers together:

• Client -- Router 1 is on the WAN, Router 2 extends the range of Router 1. The catch is that all clients can only connect to Router 2 via a wired connection. Additionally, Router 1 and Router 2 sit on different networks, so it is not possible to do things like "broadcast" between them.
• Client Bridged -- same as Client, but the two routers sit on the same network.
• Repeater -- same as Client, but the clients can connect to Router 2 via wired and wireless. The two routers sit on different networks.
• Repeater Bridged -- same as Repeater, but the two routers sit on the same network.

The easiest and most convenient configuration is the Repeater. Basically, Router 2 acts as just another computer that connects to Router 1, but creates a separate network (with a separate SSID) in its area of influence.

One drawback (to all these configurations) is that the wireless bandwidth is cut in half, roughly, because of collissions within the wireless broadcast between the two routers. This is apparently unavoidable. In our case, the 802.11g protocol is already fast enough for what we use it, that this does not create noticeable slowdowns (and SpeedTest confirms it).

The Client functionality has existed for a while (it even exists in my ancient v23 on my original router), but the Repeater functionality is new, only in v24, and (confusingly) only works right in some versions but not others. Read the documentation very carefully!

While I was researching repeaters, I also briefly looked into whether an 802.11n router might help -- they are supposed to be "faster" and have increased range. Unfortunately, the Linksys own N-products get mixed to bad reviews -- the range is not much increased, neither is the speed, and the installation process leaves much to be desired. Add to that the fact that, to use it, I'd have to get compatible 802.11n PCMCIA cards, and I'm not all that interested or excited about this.

DD-WRT continues to be an exceptional product, especially when combined with a solid piece of hardware like the WRT54GL.