Isn’t She A Beauty?

So I got my new tuner yesterday. (The component on the bottom for those of you who aren’t stereo geeks.)

It looked as good as in the seller’s pictures. Unfortunately it had a couple…issues.

First of all, I could not get it to tune in stereo. I mean I’ve never had great reception in this house, but the signal level was good on any station I tuned, and except for one brief instant, the red LED refused to trigger no matter what I did with the new coax antenna I bought for it. I considered running an outside antenna, so I ordered a 25′ coax cable thinking I could fish it through the old hole that had been drilled in the front wall for cable TV and reconnect the antenna outside.

Before I went to all that trouble (and realizing the cable I’d purchased (with already attached connectors) would not fit through the hole, I decided to just take the tuner outside and see if I could get stereo reception.

No joy. It didn’t work

The second issue was the battery-backed up memorized station feature. After the issues I’d had with my previous tuner, I figured an actual old-school battery backup would be a good thing, right? This being a fully analog tuner (not digital), the method for saving stations was rather ingenious for the time (1980-1982). The traditional tuning knob, in addition to being fully free-spinning was also motor-driven. You’d manually tune to a station, hit the memory buttons, and it would memorize the position and when you tuned to another station and wanted to go back to your memorized station the motor would engage and turn the knob back to where you set the memory.

Yamaha describes it thusly:

Well, that didn’t work either, but I wasn’t really surprised. This device was over 40 years old and unlike my other tuner which used a capacitor for backup, the NiCAD battery that powered the memory in the T-7 was undoubtedly shot.

Opening up the case, the battery was indeed shot; the contacts had corroded to such a degree that merely touching the soldered in battery sent it flying.

Undaunted, I knew this was merely a simple rechargeable NiCAD battery and all I had to do was figure out a way of attaching one back to the board now that the contacts had broken off.

I went onto everyone’s most hated online retailer and found a single cell battery case with wire leads. It arrived today, and after cleaning the board of corrosion, I soldered the leads into the holes left by the original contacts, inserted a rechargeable NiCAD, held my breath, and powered it up. It came on with no puff of smoke, so I figured that was a positive sign. I went about memorizing my three most-listened-to stations and…success!

Now about that stereo issue…

I know nothing about radio/tuners other than discovering when I was a kid if you go blindly turning those screw-like pots you can royally fuck things up.

Luckily I had the service manual for the T-7, and that limited my blindness. After marking positions of screws on the front-end of the tuner I slowly adjusted each in turn to no avail. I moved them all back to their original location and moved on to the VCO pot. Again, after marking it, all I did was insert the screwdriver and give it the tiniest of jiggles and voila! Stereo reception. It was just dirty…

So now I have a fully functional tuner. Electronics servicing is not going to become my retirement avocation, and I’m not going to strain my shoulder slapping myself on the back with two successful repairs, but damn…it does feel good to be able to fix this stuff.

And I have to say, now that it’s adjusted, I’m getting the best reception I’ve gotten through any vintage tuner or receiver I’ve owned int he last several years. With the local classical station in particular (always noisy) the background is dead silent.

We’ll see if everything is still working tomorrow. ????