Quick update

Well, a few things are going on here. First of all, I picked up the Philco 89 up in Santa Paula. Not a bad drive - it's quite nice up there, and much cooler than it's been here at home. The radio looks pretty much like it does in the picture. I was kind of wondering about the color of the cabinet - having seen the Philco 70 cathedral's original finish, the 89 just didn't look right to me.

Now that I have it, I can tell you that I'm pretty sure that someone has used a furniture refinisher or stripper on this radio. There's no trace of the lacquer that was on it originally, just bare wood. The columns and trim look too light to me, and I'm sure that's because the original finish was a toned lacquer. The veneer areas are still pretty dark. Before I start spraying this radio, I'll probably go over it with some refinisher of my own - it does have some stains that I think will come out. One of these days we'll get around to working on that.

I haven't even plugged this radio in, but I might try it on my dim-bulb / isolation transformer setup when I get a chance. The seller said it makes static. We'll see what happens when I hook some wire to the antenna terminal.

I've had a chance to play with the transmitter a lot. It works pretty well around the house, but the coverage is kind of spotty. A lot of this is probably attributable to my location right around the block from KSPN, a 50Kw powerhouse. I'm pretty sure I'd get much better results if I were in a different location. Even so, it does work well. I'd love to find some freeware scheduling software so that I could play different playlists at different times of the day, but I haven't found anything yet. The best I could do is Rivendell, which looks like a dynamite package, but it's really overkill for what I want to do, and it's Linux-only, so I'd either need to dedicate another computer, or run it in a vmware session. Seems like a lot of resources to dedicate for something like this, even though it is pretty cool.

As for the Philco 70, Mike T found me a scroll saw at a neighbor's garage sale for $10, so I'm going to have some fun with that. We'll see if I can reconstruct the front panel. One way or another I have a new toy to play with, so it's all good.

Now to just find the time to play with these toys...