Telefunken 648WP Trop Caprice

There is one good thing about plastic radios: It's a matter of removing the works, and washing the case in the kitchen sink, to restore them to original optical condition! This one cleaned up very easily, speaker grille cloth included. It was complete, except only for the TELEFUNKEN label that should have gone where now three small holes are. Maybe someday I find such a label...

Note that the apparent slanting lines on the dial are scanning artifacts. First they showed up in flashing color! Both in reality and on the original slides the radio looks correct. The dial is made from plastic too, and produces polarizing effects, that create all kind of interference patterns with the scanner! It was hard work to scan this photo reasonably well...


Technically this radio required some work. It was dead when I got it, but thankfully no one had messed with it too badly. There were some signs of someone attempting to fix the power switch on the volume control, but nothing else. The power switch was bad (never switching off), but the radio was as dead as a doornail because the DC compensation winding on the output transformer was open. I simply installed a jumper across that winding, and the radio came to life. It's the white wire you can see arranged in a loop over the output trafo, which is mounted atop the tuning capacitor.

An open transformer winding is almost always a sign of excessive current consumption. Sure enough, the output tube got very hot, and sure enough again, the grid coupling capacitor was leaky. I replaced it, and that problem was cured.

The antenna filter board was cracked from mishandling the antenna connector. I fixed this too. I have not yet repaired the transformer. The radio seems to work quite well without that DC compensation winding!

This radio is very modern, using miniature combination valves mounted on a printed circuit board. The tubes are an ECH81 oscillator and converter, an EBF89 IF amplifier, detector and AGC, an ECL82 audio preamplifier and power amplifier, and an EZ80 rectifier. All tubes have 6.3V filaments, and the power supply uses a transformer with primary combinations for all line voltages used in the world at the time of manufacture. It covers the broadcast band, and shortwave from 2 to 22 MHz in two bands. The sound is that of a small plastic radio, but quite clean.