04-30-2013, 11:47 AM
Thanks everyone for the help and ideas! What I found online, and what I remember from when I was a kid was to use a 'loop' of thin wire about the width of a bowling ball and hook up the two ends one to the GND and the other to the ANT at the back of the chassis, and then just tape the wire antenna to the inside back of the cabinet. Would that work any better? It looks like the bigger the better due to the length of the wavelength which is pretty long. I want to use what will give the strongest signal I guess.
Jerry - This coming weekend I'm going over my parents to check all the voltages and I'll post any results that don't match what they should be. About the Sig Gen, while I was tuning the radio, I did what you said and had the multi-meter hooked up to the voice coil and could see the meter moving as the person's voice on the station got louder. But sometimes, the multi-meter didn’t move at all when I was turning the tuning nuts/screws?? So, I decided that I would check to see if iPhone made a decibel app and they do, so I got that on my phone and put it by the speaker to watch how loud the speaker was getting (I could hear it, but it was so minimal it was hard to tell an increase or decrease in decibels). Anyway, following the schematics, through all 7 adjustments, I used this same method of watching the app to its highest decibels on this one station. The result was that when I was in Ann Arbor, 1 channel was coming in great (at this point I had only the antenna wire from the 'Coil' to the ANT clip on the chassis, I didn’t have the 2 feet of wire that was added when I got to my dad’s place).
My thought or fear is that in the event that the signal generator isn’t working properly, just because I was able to tune the radio to one station (via listening), doesn’t mean that the radio is “Properly Tuned” across ALL stations right? Because each station corresponds to a different frequency and tuning is based off of kilocycles from the sig generator to mimic those stations and make the tuner sensitive to receive those stations…
Jerry - This coming weekend I'm going over my parents to check all the voltages and I'll post any results that don't match what they should be. About the Sig Gen, while I was tuning the radio, I did what you said and had the multi-meter hooked up to the voice coil and could see the meter moving as the person's voice on the station got louder. But sometimes, the multi-meter didn’t move at all when I was turning the tuning nuts/screws?? So, I decided that I would check to see if iPhone made a decibel app and they do, so I got that on my phone and put it by the speaker to watch how loud the speaker was getting (I could hear it, but it was so minimal it was hard to tell an increase or decrease in decibels). Anyway, following the schematics, through all 7 adjustments, I used this same method of watching the app to its highest decibels on this one station. The result was that when I was in Ann Arbor, 1 channel was coming in great (at this point I had only the antenna wire from the 'Coil' to the ANT clip on the chassis, I didn’t have the 2 feet of wire that was added when I got to my dad’s place).
My thought or fear is that in the event that the signal generator isn’t working properly, just because I was able to tune the radio to one station (via listening), doesn’t mean that the radio is “Properly Tuned” across ALL stations right? Because each station corresponds to a different frequency and tuning is based off of kilocycles from the sig generator to mimic those stations and make the tuner sensitive to receive those stations…
