Station movement???...

[silversport]

I have a Sherwood S-3000 III monaural tuner being powered by a Sherwood S-1000 amp...lately I have noticed when powering up that I may need to adjust the tuner dial a bit to get WFMT in Chicago...this is about the only station I use this monaural rig for so my question is, does it appear I may have a Tube going or might an alignment be needed?

The Sherwood Tuner does not always need to be adjusted and I have not tried the Sherwood, leaving it on but volume down to see if the station comes in later after the Sherwood has warmed up before checking the radio signal.

Both of these units have been gone over but it has been since about 2008 when they were freshened and aligned...both of these also do not get a lot of use but perhaps an hour or so each day.

what has thrown me off is I substituted an EICO HFT-92 and may have had this same issue which leads me to believe it might be the station rather than the Tuner...I may also be misremembering so I am trying the EICO Tuner again for a bit to see if it does this too...

Thoughts or ideas on what may be causing this would be appreciated...I live in the near Chicago suburbs and am only using the ribbon type antenna for signal but really have no issues with receiving radio signal with my Nakamichi TA-2A stereo receiver...

Bill

 

[Dan ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

Doubt if it's the station. Transmitter's exciters are locked into their assigned frequency by a quartz crystal.
However, tuner drift is quite commonplace.

 

[silversport]

thanks for your response...I don't think it needs alignment and since it only does it sometimes, I thought it might be that the Tuner needs to settle in a bit after I turn it on...since that is not needed with a properly functioning Quartz Locked tuner (as in my Nakamichi) I figured this might be a Tube thing but I will monitor it...

Bill

 

[silversport]

I just wanted to add that I think you hit the nail on the head Celt...I have the Sherwood Tuner re-connected and let it warm up a bit more before listening (5 minutes or so) and it was locked on to the station...I have to add that the signal does not drift at all while listening...

I also must just prefer listening to Tubes over Solid State...at least for some things...I really prefer listening to WFMT in monaural (albeit a very strong and good sounding FM station here in ChicagoLand) over listening to the same station on the Nakamichi...even when for right now, the Oak has much better sounding speakers hooked up...the Sherwood combination sounds very rich...

Thanks again for your help!

Bill

 

[Patrice B]

Tubes drift, happen sometimes!

 

[silversport]

I'm thinking this is all it is for now...it doesn't seem to do it all the time and the second tube Tuner I tried did not seem to drift at all...thanks

Bill

 

[Patrice B]

My three Scott's don't drift but my Fisher, my Sherwood, an Arkay and a Stromberg-Carlson are affected...

 

[rmp]

I have had two Scott 310-B's. They both drifted during warm-up, one worse than the other.

 

[amptramp]

The whole idea behind the Leak Trough-Line was that the long resonator would not drift. My Trough-Line II works quite well and doesn't seem to drift because the resonator (which looks like a section of coax cable cut lengthwise) is big enough to avoid local hot spots like tubes.

 

[silversport]

I had this happen again this morning...it was the setting was just a very slight move to the right of the tuner knob to get the station in...

I guess I just wanted to know if this is something I need to address from a service point of view or replacement Tube or if this is just a nature of the beast...

thanks for your responses and support everyone...it is appreciated.

Bill

 

[rmp]

There is an article about the problem in the Nov 1960 issue of Audio Magazine.
https://archive.org/details/am-1960-11
My tech made an unsuccessful attempt to fix the drift. I have concluded that the fix is impractical, from both a labor and material point of view.

 

[silversport]

thanks SO much for that interesting read...I also enjoyed the advertisement in that magazine for my very Tuner...cool

Bill

 

[dewdude]

I wouldn't worry...not in a tuner that old. If I were to take a guess....I'd say it's probably relative to the humidity in the air and/or temperature causing either tiny fixed value caps to drift...or causing your vari-cap to have a slightly different value. Could literally be down to dust collection on the fins changing the properties ever so much.

 

[silversport]

thanks for the support everyone...