- 2023
- Feb
- 28
The Breezeshooter’s Hamfest 2023
I just noticed that the Breezeshooter’s club in PA is holding their annual hamfest again this year, after several years of everyone’s television saying we were all going to die.
While the details are scarce, it appears to be happening the first weekend in June (3rd and ?4th?) - this has always been a good show when I’ve attended, and has a lot of good deals and eye candy. I’ll post more details as they become available.
- 2023
- Feb
- 28
A General Electric T-125A “All American Five” Radio, Part II
A short update: I decided to just order some good quality parts from Mouser instead of trying to pick through the junk at a show.
While they’d probably be cheaper at a show, the three parts I need to get this radio playing cost less than $7, and that’s just because I decided to go a bit higher in quality than absolutely necessary. I should have them in hand Friday, and it won’t take long at all to get them installed.
Stand by for part 3.
- 2023
- Feb
- 7
A General Electric T-125A “All American Five” Radio
This is a radio a co-worker rescued from a barn sale, and wanted to know if it could be made to work again. The T-125A was manufactured between 1958 and 1962 (or 1963, depending on who you believe.) It still has the civil defense markings on the dial, so this radio was probably one of GE’s last radios to have this marking.
The radio apparently spent the majority of it’s life in a woodshop, and it shows. While the case plastic is in excellent condition with no chips or cracks, it’s stained with various wood coloring products. Back and original cord are present and intact, although the cord is getting stiff. It, however, exhibits no cracking so it will get left as-is for now. The inside of the radio shows you where it was for most of it’s life, being coated with wood dust.
Since these are simple inside, there wasn’t any need to grab an isolation transformer or variac, just plug the thing in. The worst that would happen would be the across-the-line capacitor would pop, so…
It exhibits exactly what you’d expect. A loud 60Hz hum, so the filters are bad. That was completely expected. It’s a dual section filter consisting of a 50uF and a 30uF capacitor, so I’m simply going to get two 47uF @ 150V caps and replace it. The across-the-line cap is .047uF at 600, it will be replaced with something similar. The only other suspect item would be the coupling capacitor between the detector and the power amplifier, so it will probably get replaced as well. The grid capacitors could be eyed with suspicion, but I’m going to leave those alone unless they show problems. One is in a couplet, which would require rebuilding the device if it’s bad.
The owner simply wants it to play long enough to go “Hey, that’s cool.”
A quick cleaning with a paintbrush and some canned air got rid of most of the dirt:
So it’s ready to repair. I’ll pick up some parts at the next few hamfests I attend.
One interesting thing about this radio is the 50C5 power amp tube. It has different color writing, so I assume it’s a (genuine GE) replacement tube. It still has something interesting about it - the getter is black. I can’t say I’ve ever seen one like this without the tube being red-plated. I have to assume this radio was on for most of it’s life. Pretty cool.
Off to a show for parts. Check back later for results on this radio.
The GE T-125A schematic.
Courtesy of radiomuseum.org
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