Sometimes those little guys will surprise you...

[GordonW]

Man, sometimes all it takes is a little tweaking/tuning, to get some big-league performance out of what would seem to be a "scrub"!

Got a little Technics SA103 receiver recently... very good physical condition (needed cleaning, but seemed to have made it pretty much unscatherd, throughout the years)... seemed to work, except it really wasn't receiving FM stations in stereo cleanly, and it just didn't seem to pull in a whole lot of station strength in either AM or FM.

Well, I figured... probably just one or more of the tuning adjustments (MPX/tuning-center filter calibration, alignment of the tuning caps, etc) was out of whack. So, I took a crack at it...

HOLY CRAP. Took a while, but I finally found all the relevant controls... the two calibrators on the tuning cap, the muting circuit threshold, the MPX/tuning-center calibrator, and the stereo-engage threshold pots on the board. Once I got all 'em set to the best I could (manually! No test equipment!), I had it where I was able to pick up some local weaker stations, that almost NEVER can be pulled in in our location (near a town square, just a couple blocks from the police, fire and EMS dispatchers, along with MEGA cell-phone towers and such)! And while it wasn't quite the quietest background noise level (but was at least as good as I would expect from ANY decent piece), it had a nice sound, with a pretty impressively LOW distortion level, good seperation and nice tonality! Having such success, I decided to try the AM... and got it where I was able to yank in some stations I normally can't even remotely get!

And this was only a TWO GANG tuning cap! Sometimes just BASIC SIMPLE design can DO THE JOB RIGHT... once you get in there and set it all right!

Regards,
Gordon.

 

[Delshadowrio]

Based on the threads I have read here, and an experiment I did at 12 years old. I am afraid to touch anything near a tuner myself. I do have some little receivers I would like to play with. Since I do not have any good stations in the remote area I am in, I do not use the fm that much. The nearest cities are San Antonio or Laredo, which are about 200 miles away. I do use my satellite Sirius car dock receiver in the house using a dc to ac inverter and it broadcasts to all my receivers in fm on my property. I can even pick it up in my truck in the driveway. Again since their are not many stations, I do not have interference problems doing it. The fm gives it a much better sound and seperation than using the home dock hooked directly into the Aux jacks on the receiver.

MM