Interesting Russian - Red Star site

[SA-Draadloos]

I don't know if Russian sets turn up in the UK - I found an interesting site which documents the sets from the 30's to the 60's - http://oldradio.onego.ru/

Some pages even include a download of the circuit. I found the site to be rather fascinating as many of their sets seemed to mimic the style and design (some almost looked like an RCA or Philips set I have seen) of Western sets - So things could not have been so isolated behind the iron curtain as imagined. A pity that when Russia was exporting its politics to Africa they never exported a few of their radios - at least something good would have come out of it then

James

[howard]

Hello James,

I have some old Russian built portable transistor radios and they're fine, similar build quality to Hong Kong products but one or two are 40+ years old and still going strong.

Regards ...... Howard

[Sideband]

Hi Guys.

Peter Scott mentioned this same site back in November.

https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...=Russian+radio

Interesting site. Have you looked at some of the circuits?


Rich.

[paulsherwin]

Originally Posted by SA-Draadloos

I found the site to be rather fascinating as many of their sets seemed to mimic the style and design (some almost looked like an RCA or Philips set I have seen) of Western sets - So things could not have been so isolated behind the iron curtain as imagined.

Hi James. In the main Russian valve sets are styled like Western European sets of about 5 years previously. They are very, very rare in Britain, apart from the Rigonda Bolshoi radiogram. The Russians started making transistor radios for export in the mid 60s to bring in hard currency, and there are quite a few of these around. There are also some East European valve table radios around made when Western makers had largely moved to transistors.

You can spot a Russian export set immediately if it has FM, since the Russian band was different (though they now use 88-108 as well). They also seem to use a rather odd font for the tuning scales.

Best regards, Paul

[quantum]

With the old Russian sets designed for domestic consumption, the FM designs are interesting. Because the Russian FM band was lower than ours (65-74mhz being common) you could get away with using a standard (Soviet equivalent) ECH81 type stage as the frequency changer rather than our normal double triode stage - I doubt that an ECH81 would be very efficient at 88-108mhz!

[Sideband]

Originally Posted by quantum

With the old Russian sets designed for domestic consumption, the FM designs are interesting. Because the Russian FM band was lower than ours (65-74mhz being common) you could get away with using a standard (Soviet equivalent) ECH81 type stage as the frequency changer rather than our normal double triode stage

Bet it was quite noisy though!! Must have been right at the limit of operation. Somewhere I think I've seen a Russian circuit using a 6K8 equivalent for FM....!


Rich