WWII Radio Restoration
One ‘new’ hobby I have taken on is the ‘art’ of radio restoration. I have always been interested in electricity and electronics. I can remember at an early age taking the back off my parent’s TV set and seeing how it worked, and pulling all the tubes out, and getting them back in the right places. In my military collection over the past 20 years, I have had some nice WWII era radios. They looked nice, made a good exhibit, but never really worked. So I decided to take a short “class” from a local man who offers his services to teach noobs like me. I spent the day with him restoring an old Philco Radio I picked up on Craigslist. One radio I had always wanted was the SCR-284. Just seemed to be the right radio for me. It could be vehicle mounted, used in the field, or as a command radio. So I decided this would be my winter hobby, repairing and restoring old radios.
I am going to Document the Radios I have restored, or am working on here. I’ll have links to the ones I have pages for if the radio is listed, I own it, but either have not worked on it yet or have not added it to the website.
RADIO AND COMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT
Radio Set SCR-284 BC-654 Radio
WWII Minerva Tropic Master “Morale Radio”
R-100/URR 1944 Espey Morale Radio
BC-314 Receiver
BC-348 Receiver (In progress)
BC-603 Receiver (In Progress)
BD-71 Field Switch Board and EE-8B Field Telephones
Home Front Radio Sets
RADIO HACKS -Great info for Reenactors or those who want to show off their radios.
BC-611 / SCR-5236 modification with an MP3player module.
Here is an easy and very cheap tip to revive a WWII radio without having to fully refurbish and restore the equipment or its power supply.
That tip has already been described in an earlier post related to the famous BC-1000/SCR-300.
Thanks to that mod you will revive your old radio set, even not working, with a dirt cheap MP3 Player
(MP3 unit), an SD card and a little battery.
Cheap and easy to do! This is courtesy of Yves of Belgium. Download the complete PDF instruction here HOW-TO-MP3_BC-611_SCR-536.pdf
Here’s another great modification by Yves showing how to modify a BC-1000 / SCR-300 with an MP3 player. Download the complete PDF instruction here HOWTO_MP3_BC-1000_SCR-300.pdf