[Le Petit Robert (1973)]
This site gathers notes and tips for restoring vintage tube radios and provides insights into their functioning. Wireless telegraphy - T.S.F. - is the origin of the transmitters and radio receivers featured on this site. You can contribute to enriching this site by using the
Contactlink in the header to share information, perspectives, or documents with me.
Happy reading ...
First Steps
When acquiring a T.S.F. radio and planning to restore it, it is necessary to clean it—both the casing and the chassis—before performing some electrical operations to make it “sing” again. During such a project, you may encounter the following situations ...
Costs in the 20th Century
When purchasing a T.S.F. radio for 20 or 30 €, it is hard to imagine the financial effort required for the original purchase. How many months’ salary did it represent for a notary, a baker, etc.? INSEE statisticians have compiled household shopping trends over the last century ...
Rules & Tables
Technicians, high school and university students in the 1960s and 1970s often had only logarithm tables, paper, pencils, and a Slide Rule. This tool, based on logarithmic scales, allowed for multiplications and divisions with a precision of ....
Capacitors
Old capacitors present several challenges for T.S.F. radio restorers: their identification—their type and characteristic values—their replacement with modern components—and their reformation (electrolytic capacitors)...
AWG Gauges
Anglo-Saxon countries use a specific gauge system to define wire and tube diameters (in English, this term translates to “gauges”). The most well-known system is the AWG (USA: American Wire Gauge). In pre-war literature, other systems can be found ...
Inductances
Determining the inductance of a coil may be necessary for restoring T.S.F. radios or understanding their design. There are no analytical formulas that give the exact value of inductance. That’s why, at the beginning of the 20th century, the first tools were developed ...
TSF Circuits
The structure of radio receivers has evolved over time. The earliest ones processed only telegraph signals, then later amplitude modulation (AM) broadcasting. Frequency modulation (FM) reception enabled interference-free listening and ...
Grounding and TSF
For radio transmission and reception installations, improper grounding can lead to high-frequency current feedback, poorly radiated by antennas. Beware, as this lost energy quickly turns into heat and can severely damage your equipment. ...
Tube Tester
A tube tester is a measuring instrument designed to test vacuum tubes. These instruments can be divided into two groups: Basic models that classify a tube as good or bad using a scale from 0 to 100%. A device of this type is presented on the page ...
Electronic Tubes
The Audion is an electronic amplification tube invented by American engineer Lee De Forest in 1906. It was the first form of triode, consisting of a partially evacuated glass tube containing three electrodes: a heated filament, a grid, and a plate. The first component ...
Batteries and Accumulators
Early radio sets were rarely powered by mains electricity. In the early 20th century, the cost of connecting to the power grid was unaffordable for many. Additionally, some power grids provided direct current, which was difficult to adapt for radios. Thus, batteries were used ...
Transformers
To design a power transformer, one must consider voltage/current parameters on one hand and frequency/losses/core material/permissible current density on the other. These factors determine the minimum core cross-section and ...
Ultrasonic Cleaning
We often rely on elbow grease to clean the dirty components of our beloved TSF radios. Soap water and a toothbrush help us reach into crevices. For a long time, industries have used ultrasonic cleaning tanks for quick and efficient cleaning ...
Chemistry and TSF
This section describes the various possibilities of chemical products used in restoration. It also discusses safety and handling equipment. The presentation is divided into 9 chapters covering the following topics: Safety — equipment, acids, bases or hydrates or alkalis, water ...
Color Codes
The "modern" marking of resistors and capacitors is based on a color-coded ring system. The correspondence between the numbers and the ring colors forms what is known as the color code, which is defined by the international standard "IEC 60757" ...
Bibliography
This section gathers the books that have helped me better understand the functioning of TSF radios. It includes theoretical and technical books from the tube era, as well as more recent books on electronics, physics, and mathematics ...
TSF Educational Kits
The educational kits presented here originate from Germany. In France, they were branded as GéGé (Le Jeune Radio),
while in Germany, they were known as Kosmos (Radiomann).
The accompanying booklet is highly educational, using a hydraulic analogy to explain electricity ...
History of TSF
The origins of radioelectricity can be traced back to early 19th-century research on electrical and magnetic interactions at a distance, conducted by Danish scientist Ørsted (1777-1851), English scientist Faraday (1788-1827), and French scientist André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) ...
Links
Many of the websites listed here are very comprehensive. Sometimes, it is difficult to categorize them by type. Musée de la Communication de Pignerolle — An exceptional collection of 1,300 pieces displayed over nearly 1,000 m² in the Château de Pignerolle...
