Despite finding at least 1000 online retailers
selling this 'kit', there's not much technical info written about it, so
I'm going to let everyone know what they're in for should they be interested
in buying one. It's based on an early kit produced by the German electronic
kit company, Kosmos, called the "Radiomann". Outside Europe it's given
a more Anglo sounding name, "Radio Ace".
I bought mine off eBay from
Online
Science Mall, back in February 2008. This was one of the cheapest retailers
at US$79.95. Postage to Australia was unbelievably fast too; I had the
radio in about a week. Many thanks also for this company sending its products
overseas...always pleased to promote establishments that do this.
It is rather surprising that so many retailers
continue to sell this receiver at over $100, so it pays to shop around.
Construction
Although promoted heavily as a kit, it
is anything but. The radio is already assembled and all that has to be
done to put it into operation is to insert 8xAA cells, screw the aerial
coil under the three terminals, plug in the headphones and connect aerial
and earth.
The chassis is made of veneered MDF and
stained in a walnut colour. All parts are new. Despite the modernity of
the construction, it is very attractive and really does look the part.
Under the chassis, the wiring is point
to point. No PCB or tagstrips are used. Wires are soldered to the ends
of components with no other support.
Two lengths of clear cellulose tape are
an attempt to keep the wiring attached to the underside of the chassis.
Four sets of double AA cell holder are bolted to the back of the chassis.
Plastic binding posts are used to make
aerial and earth connections, and also to connect the aerial coil. Two
pre wound coils are supplied with the kit; one spider web type wound with
Litz wire on a blank PCB former for medium wave reception, and the other
a conventional air cored enamel copper wire solenoid for short waves wound
on a plastic tube.
Modern low impedance headphones with a
3.5mm stereo plug are supplied and are fed via what is obviously a mains
transformer to match the phones to the 12AU7.
The tuning capacitor is an air spaced
metal unit, obviously meant for a superhet receiver. The oscillator section
is not used.
Quarter watt resistors and ceramic capacitors
are used for the circuit.
A miniature 50K switch pot of the type
used on transistor equipment is used to switch the 12V supply and adjust
regeneration.
The valve is a new Chinese 12AU7 and the
socket is porcelain.
All in all the parts are perfectly good
quality.
Simple design using point to point wiring. Even though there is
no metal chassis, hand capacitance turned out to be insignificant.
The Design
The Radio Ace is a very conventional regenerative
receiver using a 12AU7 twin triode. One triode functions as a regenerative
grid leak detector, resistance coupled to the second triode which is an
audio stage feeding low impedance headphones via a transformer. This transformer
has, according to the circuit diagram, a ratio of 20:1. It is clearly
a mains transformer and would be 220 to 12V given the German design. Provided
there's sufficient turns per volt and the DC flowing through the primary
isn't too high this scheme works very well. A 100V audio line transformer
would be the other preferred option in keeping with using standard modern
parts.
The unique aspect of design is that the
B+ is only 12V; the same supply as used by the valve heater. Supply is
from 8x AA cells. With the heater drawing 150mA, it is wise to use alkaline
cells for anything but short periods of use. At 12V the B+ current draw
is insignificant. For use of NiCad or NiMh cells, and extra double AA battery
holder should be put in circuit given these cells provide 1.2V instead
of the usual 1.5V from carbon and alkaline cells. A DC input socket would
have been a worthwile feature to allow extended operation from a mains
supply (or in my case, the 12V home lighting plant). The manual claims
the set works even when the battery has dropped to 9V. This turned out
to be true.
The aerial is coupled to either the entire
coil or to the tapping by various values of capacitor. The choice of connection
depends mainly on aerial length. In areas with strong signals, spider web
coils will pick up sufficient signal not to require an an external aerial.
This set uses plate voltage control for
adjusting the regeneration.
Feedback is from the detector cathode
to a tapping on the aerial coil. This eliminates the requirement for a
separate feedback winding.
No volume control is provided; instead
it is expected that the regeneration is backed off if volume needs to be
reduced. However, doing this has the disadvantage that selectivity suffers.
In practice, with a set like this it is seldom that the volume does need
to be reduced.
Book Review
It is obvious that the writings in the
manual are a translation from German. Some of the terminology would be
strange to those not familiar with German radio. Not once was the receiver
referred to as "regenerative" or "Reinartz", let alone "TRF". Instead it
was called an "Audion", which in English is the name of Lee De Forest's
triode.
Nevertheless, it's a nicely set out manual
and an interesting read. The 30 "experiments" are fairly limited and most
of them would be applicable to any other radio. They involve things as
trying different aerials etc, touching the coil to damp it, and observing
how the regeneration control works. Only towards the end do the experiments
become slightly more technical with such things as creating positive feedback
through the audio stages using the resistance of one's fingers to couple
to output to the input. There is also some mention of winding your own
coils and adding bandspread, although not much practical detail is gone
into.
I'm not trying to be critical here; just
alerting would be buyers of the Radio Ace that is more of a built up radio
to be used as is. It is not, as one might think from the advertising, a
kit you install the parts and solder together, or even a kit where the
same components are connected in different ways to create different circuits.
Trying it out
The radio was unfortunately an immediate
disappointment. I've had many years of experience with regenerative receivers
and this one was among the worst. Although regeneration was very smooth
and operated as it should, the gain and volume were very poor. In fact,
the volume was no better than that from a crystal set. Despite their obvious
cheapness, the headphones are of reasonable quality and I verified this
by using them with another receiver. However, they are not the most sensitive
of this type of headphone I've tried.
The aerial connections seemed to be limited;
"Ant 1" and "Ant 2" were next to useless and "Ant 3" was the only connection
that was usable. This was with long and short aerials; the long being my
outdoor wire aerial of about 30m length, and the short aerial being the
few metres of wire supplied.
I have operated vacuum tubes at low voltage
before and knew that this wasn't the cause of poor performance. There should
be much more volume into headphones from a 12AU7 operating with 12V on
the plates.
The poor performance with the aerial connections
was actually expected; capacitive coupling into an aerial coil is poor
practice. Not only does the aerial load down the coil, but sensitivity
at the low end of the band is reduced compared to the top end. A better
way is to have a separate primary winding.
The regeneration operated very smoothly,
which I did expect. I am pleased this set uses plate voltage control for
adjusting the regeneration. This or adjusting the screen grid voltage where
tetrodes or pentodes are used is the smoothest method. Controlling regeneration
by means of a variable capacitor is not only makes for critical adjustment,
but has bad backlash and worse, detunes the receiver as the control is
adjusted. The other popular means of adjusting regeneration by shunting
the feedback winding with a variable resistor is even worse. While the
receiver isn't detuned by this method the backlash is considerable and
adjustment extremely critical.
Clearly, some modifications would have
to be done to make it a practical receiver with good performance and not
be relegated to being an attractive static display.
Original circuit of the Radio Ace. I thought some of the component
values were a bit strange even before I tried out the set. My suspicions
were correct.
Redesigning the Ace
The choice of component values had me
curious and it seemed the designer must have had some knowledge of valve
regenerative receivers, or managed to find circuits to copy, but some of
the values chosen would appear more suited to a transistor circuit than
a valve one.
First thing to do was fix up the grid
leak; 100K is a rather low value and there was no way as much detected
audio can appear across it compared to a much higher value. Normal values
of grid leak are from around 500K to 2M. I tried 1M which improved things
markedly; but 2.2M was even better. The value of grid capacitor is a bit
high; something like 100 or 250pF is usual. I left the 330pF in situ as
the difference doesn't make it worth changing.
Next was the grid leak for the audio stage.
Again 100K is low and is not used for this application except in certain
high gain output valves which are prone to grid emission...something the
12AU7 is not going to experience running at 12V! Increasing this resistor
to a more appropriate value of 1M gave further improvement to volume.
Incidentally, in case you are wondering
about lack of negative bias for the output stage, the 12AU7 triode cannot
draw significant current at 12V and anything more than a small amount of
bias would impair the operation of this stage.
Next improvement was for the detector.
22K as a plate resistor is more appropriate to solid state circuitry. Low
values mean low gain. It was necessary to increase this resistor at least
to around 47K; up to 220K if possible. Doing so with only 12V B+ might
however reduce the detector plate current to the point where the detector
won't oscillate. I had thought of schemes involving 9V batteries to jack
up the voltage, but as it turned out this wasn't necessary. With a 100K
plate load the detector oscillated just as well as before, even with the
aerial coil heavily loaded. The difference now was we had much more volume
and gain. It was what this type of receiver should have.
Final mod was the aerial coupling. While
I would prefer a separate primary winding for the aerial coil, to add one
would be impractical. An extra terminal would be needed on the aerial coil
just for starters. So, I was left with trying to make the best of the capacitive
coupling. First thing was to remove the connection to the coil tapping
as connecting aerials here was useless. Worse, connecting through the 12pF
capacitor was even more of a waste of time. This is an absurdly low value
to use and is more suited to VHF receivers. The coil tapping is at a very
low impedance and a 12pF capacitor has a very high reactance at 1000 kilocycles,
meaning virtually no signal gets through. I settled on a direct connection
to "Ant 1" to allow for very short aerials, via the 33pF to "Ant 2" for
medium length and via the 12pF in series with the the 33pF to the "Ant
3" connection when long aerials are used. The problem with capacitive coupling
to aerial coils is that tuning, selectivity, and regeneration are very
dependent on aerial characteristics. It's very tight coupling and certain
aerials can actually stop the detector being able to oscillate; not only
that this may be evident at only certain parts of the band. Further, even
when regeneration can be optimally set, selectivity can still suffer because
of excessive signal input due to the tight coupling. The other problem
is aerial capacitance is effectively in parallel with the aerial coil and
thus affects tuning range. A long aerial can prevent stations at the top
end of the band being received. Yet another bad aspect is that gain across
the band varies; high at the high end where the coupling capacitor reactance
is low, to poor at the low end when the reactance is higher and less signal
is coupled. This method of aerial coupling strikes me as being for people
who are too lazy to put an extra winding on the aerial coil. If one insists
on this method, it's best to use a variable capacitor, but that means another
control to adjust each time a new station is tuned in. One single winding
with the aerial capacitively coupled does seem very popular with simple
receiver designs and I wonder if those who use this method get frustrated
at the poor performance.
Redesigned circuit. Modifications were: - R3 to 1M, R2 to 100K,
R1 to 2.2M, Ant.1 direct to C1/R1/C4 junction, Ant.2 to Ant.1 via 33pF,
and Ant.3 to Ant.2 via 12pF.
The New Improved Ace
The receiver is now a pleasure to use.
Volume is more than adequate now and the DX performance is what it should
be; for example receiving 2XL from Cooma in Sydney at good volume.
The lack of volume control is not really
an impediment as volume is not overpoweringly loud. In Sydney, it is only
necessary to earth the receiver to hear the local stations at good volume;
an aerial is not needed. However, 2m of wire connected to "Ant 1" will
give even greater volume. In the Blue Mountains, the full 30m of outdoor
aerial connected to "Ant 3" gives good results. Unfortunately, the limitation
of not being able to receive stations at the top end of the band becomes
evident when doing this. It would be necessary to reduce the number of
turns on the aerial coil to compensate. However, some coverage at the low
end of the band would be lost doing this. The seriousness of the problem
is not sufficient to warrant modifying the aerial coil.
To the listener it certainly isn't obvious
the receiver is running off 12V. It performs much like any other one valve
set and the good volume doesn't give it away.
Incidentally, there is enough room under
the chassis for a 12V 2.2Ah SLA battery which would be a more economical
way of operating the receiver away from the mains.
One convenient aspect of this receiver
is having the binding post aerial coil connections; it thus becomes a very
handy test bed for trying out other coils without having to desolder anything.
Another feature is that provided one completes the grid circuit, by removing
the aerial coil, the set can be used as a low power headphone amplifier.
Connect the audio input between "Ground" and "Ant. 1" (in the modified
receiver, or to the aerial coil terminal that connects to the tuning capacitor
in the unmodified set). If the audio source does not have a DC path to
earth, simply connect a resistor across it. The value isn't critical; something
around 1M will do. Using the set like this isn't anything new; it was often
done to add gramophone pickups to early radios.
Other Valves
Given there's quite a few other twin triodes
with the same pin connections, I decided to try some other types to see
how well they worked in this regenerative circuit at low voltage. First
off, the other well known 12.6V heater types; 12AT7 and 12AX7. Not useable
at all. Some faint sound was heard but that was it; no regeneration was
possible.
Then to a couple of 6.3V types, with the
heater temporarily powered from an external supply. 6ES8 is a frame grid
VHF amplifier used in TV tuners. As I suspected, due to it's low plate
voltage (90V) and very high gain (12.5ma/V) it worked well; certainly just
as well as the 12AU7. 6CG7 was the other valve I tried. It's actually the
9 pin replacement for 6SN7; to be specific the 6SN7GTA. It was intended
to be used in TV line oscillator circuits, but like other valves found
widespread applications elsewhere. Dsepite its similarity with 12AU7, not
only did it work very well, I suspect even slightly better than the 12AU7.
I think the 6CG7 works so well with 12V plate voltage simply because of
it's hotter cathode (6.3V@600ma) which is twice the power of the 12AU7's
heaters. I do wonder also if the larger cathode and plate area also helps.
No doubt 6SN7 should work the same, being the equivalent. Presumably 12BH7
would be another suitable candidate. However, if operating off a limited
battery supply, the obvious choice is to stick with the 12AU7 as all the
other types draw more heater current.
12V High Tension for valves
Seeing as I haven't got around to it yet
and this is the most appropriate place to discuss it, I'll give a quick
mention about 12V operation of valves. This is nothing new. Operating valve
plates and screens off 12, 9 and even 6V is not new. Not only was this
done with one valve sets just like this one to avoid a separate, expensive,
and large B battery, but from the late 1950's to the mid 1960's the technique
was used in hybrid car radios. Valves were used for the RF, Converter,
IF, detection, and audio amplifier in the normal way, but running
off 12V B+. Because valves cannot provide high power output at 12V, a transistorised
stage was used to drive the speaker. There is sometimes the assumption
that the valves used in hybrid car radios were all of the space charge
type. Space charge mode is used with so called "dual grid" valves like
the type 49 and later 12K5. Here, positive voltage is put on the first
grid (equivalent to the control grid) to force an increased electron flow.
The second grid (equivalent to the screen grid) is used as the control
grid. Some pentodes, in particular the 6C6, have been connected to work
in space charge mode in simple one or two valve sets running off 6V B+.
Apparently, when so used, the heater voltage becomes rather critical and
needs to be less than 6V.
Apart from the valve driving the output
transistor in some car radios (e.g. 12K5,12AL8,12DL8, 12DS7,12DU7,12DV8),
the other valves are in fact not space charge valves. Not only does the
circuit diagram prove the point by showing them connected as per normal
250V valves, so does the internal construction. Generally, the space charge
valves provide an audio power of 20-40mW which is sufficient to drive a
power transistor operating in single ended class A. However, conventionally
constructed valves are also used as drivers; 12J8 and 6ET6 are examples.
A few Astor circuits even show a 6BA6. Where a conventionally constructed
(i.e. non space charge) valve is used and cannot drive the output transistor
on its own, a second transistor is used for driving purposes.
The plate current is minimal when conventionally
constructed valves are used on 12V. What needs to pointed out here
is there's a big difference in voltage gain and power gain.
Plate voltage is not so important with
voltage gain in the front end of a radio receiver, and in fact reducing
the B+ does not cause it to drop off as much as might be thought. On the
other hand, power gain is drastically reduced, and using valves like 6AQ5
as output valves with 12V plate and screen supply results in only milliwatts
of output. Good for headphone use or even a speaker in a quiet room, but
totally useless for a car radio.
The 12V "hybrid" or "car radio valves"
(especially those in the front end) are essentially the same as their mains
counterparts but either selected versions, or versions made to much higher
specifications. Radio & Hobbies for April 1959 discusses the design
of hybrid car radios, and gives examples by saying 12BL6 is constructed
similar to 12BA6, and 12AD6 is similar to 12BE6. Essentially, the grid
characteristics are made uniform for low voltage operation. It's possible
to use selected 'mains' valves as replacements, or alternatively adjust
the bias to suit if necessary.
To prove my theory, I got out a mains
operated radio with the very typical 6AN7(ECH80) and 6N8(EBF80) converter
and IF/detector valves.
The audio was a 6DX8(ECL84) triode pentode.
I took the 6X4 rectifier out, connected a 12V DC supply into the set's
HT line, bridged all the screen and decoupling resistors, and reduced the
6AN7 oscillator feed resistor to half. The heaters were powered off the
transformer as per usual. I wasn't really surprised at the very comfortable
headphone volume level and the good sensitivity of the set. Sensitivity
appeared to be much like any other valve superhet. The set really started
to liven up at 15V B+. The limiting factor was the local oscillator being
shunt fed by a resistor. Had I changed the local oscillator circuit, the
set would have functioned with less than 12V.
Futhermore, once when servicing an HMV
hybrid car radio with a broken 12BL6, I did actually subsitute a 12AU6
and it did work. To prove the point, I have constructed a perfectly normal
superhet receiver using '250V' type valves, but operating on 12V. See link
below.
More Information:
There is some interesting and useful info
here.
Use the Google translator to read in English
here.
The site examines using other valves and aspects of the design. It appears
that the author is actually the designer of this and other Kosmos kits.