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Thread: History of the car radio

  1. #16
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    Sadly Motorola left many of the franchised mom and pop radio shops out of the transition to cellular technology. I did a lot of maintenance work at Mo-Com and at the repeater sites around town. Its all obsolete now and the shop is like a ghost town.
    Best Regards, Maurice

  2. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by Maurice Mcmurry View Post
    Sadly Motorola left many of the franchised mom and pop radio shops out of the transition to cellular technology. I did a lot of maintenance work at Mo-Com and at the repeater sites around town. Its all obsolete now and the shop is like a ghost town.
    We still have a local vendor who stays very busy with the communications radio side of things. I think the Police/Fire etc is still a key part of Motorola's business. The analog side has been saturated by many competitors but they created and patented a digital system (I know little about it) and it's a subscription service but also a very secure system as I understand it. You have to have a digital scanner to even monitor it. That's as much as I know about it.

  3. #18
    My favorite car radio was the 'magic bar tuning' AM radio my friend had in his '59 Oldsmobile, had a pair of narrow bars on top, left bar scanned for stations left, the right scanned right... The REALLY cool thing was, there was also a switch on the floor near the headlight dimmer switch that would scan to the next station right. Pretty freaky in those days when unsuspecting riders thought you could change the radio station by telling it to!
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  4. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by Roger Feeley View Post
    A bit off topic but I wonder if anyone has made solid state ‘tubes’ that you can plug into a tube radio.
    I recall there being some for rectifier tubes. Not much else because the voltages used were different for tubes and transistors.

    https://www.amplifiedparts.com/produ...r-5ar4-5u4-5y3

    Another problem was the folks using tube amps want tube replacements, not solid state. Something to do with the harmonics, so there wasn't much in the way of demand.

    jtk
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  5. #20
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    At least for home radios the tube heaters are in series so even a solid state tube has to have. a resister to dump some voltage into the air.
    Bill D.

  6. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Dufour View Post
    At least for home radios the tube heaters are in series so even a solid state tube has to have. a resister to dump some voltage into the air.
    Bill D.
    If you added up the voltage drop for all the tubes in one of those cheap tube radios, it added to 120 volts (if I recall correctly). They all had to use the same current.

    Mike

    [And if I remember correctly, the first number on the tube type was the voltage for the filament. Here's a Wikipedia link to a discussion of those radios. The radios I worked on used the miniature tubes.]
    Last edited by Mike Henderson; 05-06-2022 at 12:14 PM.
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  7. #22
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    Thank you. Very interesting!
    All the best.

    Osvaldo.

  8. #23
    Good post! Enjoyed that!
    "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

    “If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

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