Technical Shorts’ is a series of (fairly) short articles written by Gerry O'Hara, a CVRS Director and vintage radio enthusiast, each focusing on a technical issue of relevance in repairing, restoring or using Eddystone valve radios. However, much of the content is also applicable to non-Eddystone valve receivers. The articles are the author’s personal opinion, based on his experience and are meant to be of interest or help to the novice or hobbyist – they are not meant to be a definitive or exhaustive treatise on the topic under discussion….

References are provided for those wishing to explore the subjects discussed in more depth.

Receiver Alignment

Introduction

Much has been written on aligning receivers (or ‘re-aligning’, assuming that the receiver in question was aligned to start with!) and I am sure many folks reading this will have plenty of experience of doing this – if so, apologies. However, I am also sure that many Eddystone enthusiasts with little experience of re-alignment will have had to try to undo the best efforts of someone who had no clue (or, dangerously, only a bit of a clue) of what they were doing – at worst, this can range from someone ‘tightening up all those loose screw-thingies that crumble to dust when a bit too much effort is applied to the screwdriver’ - Aaarghhh!, or who did not have even the most basic of test equipment or information on the receiver being worked on (the ‘mad twiddler’ syndrome…). Having been shown how to align a receiver by ‘little John’ at my job in a radio repair shop circa 1971, I was eager to try out my new-found skill in those dim and distant days of my youth, so one of my first experiences of re-alignment was with my Eddystone EC10 (I must have done it a hundred times trying to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of the poor thing) – unfortunately its IF transformers were not really up to this amount of adjustment and I remember replacing at least one of them and all the iron dust cores…

This ‘Short’ is really meant for those ‘casual’ radio ‘techs’ that may need to do this procedure once in a blue moon, but when they do, they want to do it right (and they cannot remember quite how ....

We hope you have enjoyed reading this article sample. Members of the Canadian Vintage Radio Society (CVRS) can download the entire article for free from the CVRS website here. (You must be a logged-in CVRS member to access).