Philips vintage broadcast receiver model BX200U - restoration and improvements
This is the Philips BX200U broadcast receiver, covering the Medium Wave, Shortwave and Longwave broadcast bands. It has a built-year of 1950. As such, many significant points of our history would have been heard through it's speaker: The Korean war; assassination of the Kennedy's; the moon landing; Soviet invasions of Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia; the Vietnam War and so on.
This radio was targeted by Philips for the budget-conscience buyer with a small wallet (which was almost everyone in Europe right after WWII). To keep the cost as low as possible, it was designed as a so called "U" radio, without a power transformer. The tube filaments were all placed in series and connected directly to the AC mains using a hefty drop-down resistor. Same was done for the plate voltage; the AC mains voltage was rectified directly by means of a single-phase tube rectifier. See the video for the details on this.
Due to the passing of 72 years, the radio was in poor condition when I got it. But very restorable. In the video I show the several steps to bring it back in a condition that is now better than when it was new. I also did some mods to make the radio run much less hot, so it was basically a 'Resto-mod". It also has a vastly improved dial-scale illumination now. Over all, the radio now consumes less than half the AC power that it did when new (16 watts now vs 48 watts original).
The whole restoration turned out to be more work than originally anticipated, but it was worth it. As such, the video got longer than I wanted it to be. If you don't want to sit it out for the full ride, just skip to the parts that interest you, and that hopefully might help you in your own vintage radio restoration endeavors. Thank you for watching this video.
