After going through this unit, replacing the capacitors and wandering around the incorrectly built speakers, we arrive at the actual defective portion of the unit: the speaker.
Obviously, I can’t just order a new one from EICO, that company having been dissolved many years ago. As this appeared to be a regular 4” square speaker, I found one that looked to fit. In this case, the Philmore TS45, a 4” 5W mylar cone unit was purchased.
It went in without issue, and fits the original mounts.
Of course, even this cheap speaker outstrips the capabilities of the tracer, but it is what it is. You can see into the unit from the front, which is kind of cool.
I had some suggestions to backlight the device. I’m thinking no.
The speaker works well. Since this is an aural device, I have a couple of videos of the device working coming up in the wrapup post. Stay tuned!
The small value capacitors in the EICO 150 need to be replaced as well. Yes, this should have been before the testing post, but…this little wereboar hasn’t had enough coffee yet, I mean I meant to do that…totally meant to do it this way!
There are three small value capacitors in this unit. Two teal-colored 0.22μF, and one gray 0.01μF. The teal parts are interstage and blocking for the meter, the 0.01 is input blocking for the RF side of the unit. While these parts seem ok, I’ve had other EICO devices where similar parts were a dead short - so they go.
Here’s the before shot:
And the after shot:
For the input blocking part, I used a film 0.01μF at 400V, same value as the original. The other parts are WIMA 0.22μF at 250V parts, similar ratings to what was there.
The one on the far left is the meter input block. It has a 10k in front of it, but I think that is probably going to have to be changed - you really need to drive this thing loud to get any noticeable deflection on the meter, and the meter is just a visual indicator, not a measurement. A mechanical eye tube, so to speak.
That’s all for the internals, next is the speaker since it’s shorted. Stay tuned!
As I have a decent capacitance meter with ESR capabilities, I decided to see exactly how bad the removed parts are. For the test, I’m using a FNIRSI LC1020 that I’ve shown to be more than accurate enough for hobby purposes, and you can read my analysis at this link.
I tested the parts in no particular order save from smallest to largest. These are all going in the junk bin, so there’s no need to mark them as to what they are - I can always retest if need be, but these won’t be used again except as other test parts.
For the following chart, the first column is marked value. The next two columns are values read at a particular frequency, in μF. The last two columns are ESR at a particular frequency, in Ω.
The smaller ones have fairly high ESR at low frequencies, with that decreasing as F increases. That’s expected - they’re still shot, but low value parts generally have higher ESR. Larger values, like the filters, were fine - but old. They got replaced as a matter of course.
For the smaller values, these were generally good save for the fact that I’ve seen those little teal parts short. They were replaced with good quality WIMA capacitors, or in the case of the 0.01μF, a new axial film.
A note on the 0.01μF part - the meter refused to stabilize when reading ESR on this one. I assume it’s probably going bad. Since it’s the input blocking capacitor for the RF side, it’s probably for the best that it was replaced.
There’s still some work to do as the capacitors actually need to be replaced (yeah that should have been first!) and then the speaker install and test. Stay tuned!
In the last part, I noticed that the output transformer appeared to be installed incorrectly in the tracer. While the color codes were indeed wrong, the kit builder did install it correctly. This was verified with an impedance check revealing about 136Ω on the primary, and about 5Ω on the secondary. That was measured at 1KHz, and is fine for a transistor output circuit. It was reinstalled in the correct direction.
Moving forward…the only thing left is the speaker. And yes, it’s bad. This should measure 8Ω approximately in both DC resistance and AC impedance. You can clearly see it doesn’t - 0.3Ω is not a good speaker, and I’m surprised there was enough voice coil for it to even work.
I don’t have an 8Ω speaker (one is on order) so I grabbed a small 60Ω unit from a stash of Olson parts and measured it. You can clearly see it reads 60Ω both AC and DC.
Two of these in series would be fine for testing, but I waited until I could get a small speaker for testing. I picked up one at Micro Center and the volume level increase is quite noticeable. It’s too small for the unit, so I ordered a generic 4” unit from an online vendor.
Why did it go bad? The unit doesn’t have any noticeable moisture damage, so that’s probably out. It was mentioned that someone could have used the test speaker function and overpowered it - that seems most likely. It’s only a 400mW unit, so anything modern would blow it apart.
I should have a replacement for this device within a few days. Stay tuned!
I’ve been slowly going through this device, checking parts because the output seems very low and distorted. I can overdrive one of the interstage transistors with not much input, there’s something wrong.
Here’s what I’ve come up with:
1. Leaking coupling capacitor. Unlikely, in my opinion, because the voltages here are pretty low.
2. A resistor or other part has simply gone bad. Possible, but I checked resistors and while some are out of tolerance, none are what I would consider terrible for a carbon composition resistor.
3. There’s a wiring error present.
Let’s focus on #3. After going through the unit, verifying what I could, I started checking bias on transistors. The bias on the final output should be 0V at the collector.
Here’s a schematic of that final output, Q4, and the output transformer that couples it to the speaker:
I have -1.577 noted on the collector. That’s not right, it should be 0, or very close to it as there’s no DC resistance on the input side of the transformer.
Now…note that there are two sections. One is identified by a Red/Black to ground, the other, Red/Yellow to ground. The input sides are also differently colored, but they don’t really call attention to that in person. We’ll get to that later.
You can probably guess what happened, and there was something in the back of my head going “The output isn’t right, but I don’t know why. Check that closely.”
The original builder connected the 16Ω speaker output side to the transistor. Not only was it trying to drive a 0.7Ω load into a 16Ω speaker, the output transistor was trying to drive into the wrong impedance. I’m really surprised it even worked, and it may explain why the output was driving excessive voltage into the transformer. Fortunately, the transformer seems to be good…I hope. There is about 15MΩ of leakage across the windings, but that could just be normal for this guy.
While I haven’t changed the order of the wiring yet (probably going to require some wire stretching,) I imagine this will probably help the output levels substantially.
Why did they do this? Well…
1: They didn’t bother measuring and didn’t pay attention to the colors on the Yellow/XXX (and to be fair it’s very difficult to differentiate in person, the camera reveals more color than the naked eye does,)
2: They wanted to use the higher impedance input side as an output for high impedance headphones.
I’d guess #1. Well, yes…but no.
I measured the connections with a meter. Yellow/Black and Red/Black are connected! The transformer was made wrong. The person that wired it wired it properly based on the colors. It worked (poorly) so they just assumed it is what it is and moved on! I wonder if that had anything to do with the problematic transistor repairs early in it’s life?
Maybe not?
The transformer, while wired wrong, was probably installed correctly. It’s been so long since I’ve worked with this kind of device that I don’t have any reference these days. The primary should be low ohms, and the secondary should be quite low.
When I measure the 8 ohm speaker, it’s shorted. That’s probably the issue. I just need to get hold of an 8 ohm speaker, and rat shack isn’t there for me anymore…
I made the changes to the circuit and it’s worse. But the speaker is certainly a problem. More troubleshooting to come.
There’s not much to say here other than this thing is a mess. The person doing the rework was persistent. Not good, but persistent.
I wondered why all of this was done, but then found a piece of the original wire buried under some crap. It’s very thinly insulated, almost a couple of woven strands of thread and just disintegrates. If that’s what this was wired with, it probably lost most of it’s insulation. Still no excuse for the way it was done.
I’m going to present some pictures here. Some may have a blurb, others may just be before/after sets. There’s probably going to be a few more of this type of post since everything needs redone…
Rework pictures
Even some of the original parts, like the big 500Ω resistor, were cut and resoldered. Barely. I’m going to simply remove everything in the power supply and rebuild it as a unit.
The Hall of Shame
So. Many. J. Hooks.
I’m surprised this worked. It’s more oxide than metal.
This electric spider was hiding in the power supply.
If you want to mail order a Dayton Hamvention ticket, now is the time! You have until May 1st, after which tickets will be held will-call at the gate. This is for domestic orders, international orders are being held will-call right now.
Mail order ticket sales have ended. All sales are now will-call.
This device has a lot of little capacitors all over the place. Interstage, coupling, bypass, etc. There’s even a multi-section filter array underneath. Most of the small ones were bad, as in >90Ω ESR bad.
Replacing the capacitors in the EICO 150
Here’s what we’re working with. This is a “Type 1” assembly, and has a mix of topside and bottom chassis parts:
I decided to go with all good stuff here. Small capacitors are Wurth, larger ones are Vishay or IC. As this is a single sided board, it was easy enough to heat the joint, pull the part, and then clean up the pad with some wick. New capacitors were bent as to provide leads to each pad, or folded over as needed. Parts on the bottom were simply patched in place of the previous part.
The ones that were really bad were all of the little 1μF 15V parts. Every one of these was well past useful with ESR measurement. Some of the larger ones were tired, but ok, with the filters being acceptable - although appearing to have been replaced at some point in their life already.
Every capacitor in here that’s an electrolytic has been replaced. I did a quick check on those teal blue ones, as I’ve found those to be shorted in other EICO devices. These seemed to be ok, but it would be best that those get replaced as well.
Testing the repair
The gain is certainly much higher now - 1KHz test tones are loud enough to damage your hearing. I tried a radio source, it doesn’t seem to have enough gain here - but that could be impedance matching isn’t very good, as the radio’s drive is nothing more than the low-level output of the demodulator IC itself. I need to look into this a bit more. There’s also some wiring I want to clean up in this unit, just because it’s not tacked together well. That will come with the other capacitor replacements.
It works, and is probably good enough at the moment. We’ll get come back to this one soon enough.
It’s not good enough and has some transistor biasing issues, as well as some WTF from the previous owner.
Notes
The transistors this thing uses, or can use:
2x 2N3391A. - These are generally obsolete, but can still be found easily enough.
1x 2N3906 - These are common as dirt.
1x NTE152 - This is the final output and is becoming scarce, although is still available.
If you have one of these devices, it may be wise to stock a few of the obsolete parts.
This is a neat little kit that was provided to me for review.
This is from the same vendor as the crystal radio kit, and can be purchased at the same eBay store. The kit itself is $20, which is really reasonable for a kit like this. it’s got enough parts to keep you busy for a couple of hours, and is what I would consider a “beginner with some experience” level. There’s nothing really here that should prevent someone with a soldering iron and some patience from assembling.
It comes packed, of course, in a neat little box:
Inside the box, we have all of the parts, including a PCB with the main IC soldered in place. You can request the IC be left unsoldered if you prefer to do it yourself, but as SMT is a bit beyond beginner the choice is yours. Advise the seller of your preference when ordering.
Some general notes on building kits
If you’re serious about building stuff like this, purchase or 3-D print a component bender. These are triangular shaped plastic tools with slots in them for various size parts, and the spacing gets bigger (obviously?) as the triangle grows. It makes for neat installation, although it’s not a necessary item. For this particular board, the spacing for resistors and inductors is 0.4”, which is usually the smallest you can bend a 1/4” part and still have enough lead that you’re not damaging the part body.
For marked parts, i.e. parts with a printed value, always try to keep the value face pointed in a direction where you can easily read it. Small capacitors like the 27pF parts in this kit are good examples. While you know what they are now, you may not remember later and having them easily visible is always good practice.
For other parts, like electrolytics and LEDs, never trust that the long lead is the anode side. While this is “common industry language,” I’ve seen parts made with equal, or even opposite leads over the years. Always verify before installation. View the markings on capacitors, measure LEDs with a diode checker if you’re unsure. That minute you spend could save a lot of time in the future.
For parts like capacitors that have a meniscus (coating) that goes down the leads, it’s best to try and raise them up a bit when soldering. This is to prevent the coating from being down in your solder. Electrolytics are similar, except you’re not trying to prevent contamination, you’re giving yourself a little room to see if the capacitor pukes out it’s electrolyte over the years. A small piece of 22ga insulated wire will work wonders here, just use it as a lift under the part as you solder and then pull it out when done.
And last, but not least - while you don’t need to clean the flux off a board, if you want to wash the board, do it before installing things like potentiometers and other parts that can get flux ingress. You don’t want your moving items to become not-moving because it’s gummed up with flux. Be careful if you’re cleaning after everything is installed as not to contaminate moving parts.
The kit itself.
Like the crystal radio kit, this went together easily. The board is well marked, and even without the instruction leaflet you should have no trouble assembling this item if you have any kind of electronics experience. Pay attention to polarities on capacitors and LEDs, of course - everything else is place and solder.
I like to put a component in, tack it quickly on the front side (resistors and inductors,) and then do any forming or cutting of leads on the backside before fully soldering. That’s the “technically proper” way of doing this, form, cut, solder. Diagonal cutters put a lot of stress on a lead, and you can crack joints. While this is unlikely, cut your leads so that you have some small amount of wire sticking up from the board and solder the part in, making sure to pick the lead that’s unsoldered first!
For parts you’re lifting, just hold gently with a finger and get a little solder on your iron tip and quickly hit the joint. Form, cut, and the solder the part in properly, and remove the lift.
It took me about 90 minutes to assemble, but I wasn’t in a hurry. You could probably do this in under an hour if you wanted, but take your time. Make sure you get good flow-through and nice shiny joints. It’s not going anywhere.
I ended up with a nicely populated board:
Testing
For this test, I set the radio up with some wire leads and used my bench supply to get 3VDC. The creator pipes input voltage in via a terminal, so you could use the included battery box to power the device, or you could use any source of 3V. I have an old rat shack solar array that puts out something around 3V, I’ll give it a try if we ever get a sunny day here in Ohio…this is where the emergency portion of the device shines. You can run this off of anything that has 3V somewhere. Solar, battery, probably even a bleach cell (which I want to try as soon as I get some metal and a couple of ice cube trays!)
Continuing setup, I gave it an earth ground via the local electrical system, and just tossed a cliplead over some stuff for an FM antenna. Audio was provided by my EICO 145 signal tracer, although the device really is intended for a small set of headphones.
How’s well does it work?
Very well! I was able to tune through almost all of the major stations here with only a few of the local lo-watt ones not being present. I would assume, however, that with a proper FM dipole the radio would work much better - but as it stands, it will work with just a random piece of wire which is what you want for a device that’s supposed to be for those oh-crap moments. I need to get someplace less electrically noisy to test the other bands, and will do that as soon as I have the ability.
Power draw on the unit was about 100mA constant, so AAA batteries, if new and fresh, should give you maybe 8 hours of continuous listening. Maybe a little less depending on what kind of headphones you’re driving, and the condition of your batteries.
Final thoughts
One of the really cool things about this kit is the radio IC used tunes with resistance, instead of capacitance. That saves a lot of cost and potential failure points. It’s quite the little marvel when it comes right down to it, and I’m considering what I could use that for in my own projects. It also means no bent plates or corroded capacitance if you store it for a long period.
Beyond that?
This is an extremely attractively priced kit. It’s easy to assemble, and does something useful in the end. My opinion on this is it’s a yes. You want to build a kit that does something? Get one of these. Build it and use it as a bench radio, or test it and stash it with some small tools and wire for those situations where you may not have anything else.
Happy listening! There will be one more review in this series, coming soon!
I’m going to start by replacing the two 0.1μF capacitors on the topside of the chassis. These go from terminals down to the range switch, in a j-hooked, messy sort of way. There’s some wire attached to one of the posts as well, and it’s burnt to the point where the insulation is crispy. Whomever had this before applied a lot of heat to things.
There’s not much to say about this, so here’s the before picture. The orange drops in back are probably still good, so I’ll pull them and drop them in the bin for later use. After a little cleanup, that is.
Here’s the after picture. I replaced both parts, as well as the connecting wire on the range switch, which you can just see poking up out of the chassis. It’s a yellow wire, and replaces the original that was crispy and so tightly pulled it just barely cleared the moving switch parts.
They aren’t soldered in on the terminals yet because I want to run new wire and possibly clean up that area little as well. Stay tuned, more “this sure does take a long time to replace one part” coming soon!
