Mystery Radio


This tombstone radio is the latest addition to my collection. I need HELP identifying it!!!

It is a rather large radio: 55 cm tall, about 40 wide and 28 deep! The front seems to be mahogany. There are signs of a brand label in the form of two tiny nail holes, but the label is gone. The speaker grille cloth does not seem to be the original. It looks like an earlier "restorer" replaced it by a panty hose!


This is the strangest aspect of this radio: The dial is graduated from 0 to 100, rather than any frequency indication!  I had seen this only on very early radios, dating to 1922 or so.

The knobs (of which one is missing) have a rather unusual shape, and I will need to make a two-part mold for casting a replacement.


The speaker is very small compared to the cabinet size. As in all radios of this vintage, it has an electromagnet, and like most of them the output transformer is mounted on the speaker.

  
The design is an early superhet, probably with 175kHz IF. The tube lineup is this:

- 58 RF amp
- 2A7 converter
- 58 or 57 IF amp, the tube number cannot be read
- 55 detector and audio pre amp
- 59 power amp
- 80 rectifier

This would date the radio pretty much to 1933, or maybe 1932. All tubes except one are RCA "Radiotrons", but this doesn't tell much about the radio's brand since most radios then used RCA tubes. On the other hand, RCA was the most commonly sold brand here in Chile in those years, so it is likely that this is an RCA. Other radios I have seen with this tube lineup are Majestic sets, and some Atwater Kent too use these tubes.

Update:

Fellow radio collector Renato Menare identified this radio as built by one of the many "radio assemblers" who were active in Argentina in those years! Renato even gave me an exact knob to replace the missing one. The radio is probably a few years younger than what the technology in it suggests. Inspection of the components indeed reveal a lot of parts made in Argentina, while other components come from all around the world.

If you have any more info, it's still welcome!



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