Any Radio folks among the phono collectors??

[Valecnik]

My Stromberg Carlson Battery Set. I believe this cost ~ $300 in 1924. I had a guy build a power supply for me several years back so it works fine.

See the last picture for tuning instructions. If someone can explain it more articulately please step in. It may not be exactly the right way but it works.

[JohnM]

That certainly is a handsome radio! The only TV we had until I was in high school (1971) was a black & white Stromberg-Carlson with perhaps a 14" screen in a blonde cabinet with doors over the screen and a speaker in the bottom. My parents probably bought it around 1950 give or take a year or two. The picture tube finally went out in '71!

[gregbogantz]

Bruce, your radio set is also a TRF. The Neutrodyne name was a variation on the TRF circuit. Tuning one of these early sets with multiple tuning dials is akin to cracking a safe. All the tuning dials need to be in the correct ballpark setting in order to begin to find a station in the frequency range of interest. Once the desired station was found, the dials were each finely adjusted to produce the maximum audio level. The procedure given by the radio maker is pretty much the way it was done on any of these sets. When the set is properly designed, all the tuning dials should be set at approximately the same setting numbers for any given station. But there was a lot of variation from one set to another, so often the dials would end up needing fairly different settings to get the best reception. People often kept radio log books by these sets in which they could mark down the optimum dial settings after they found a station that they wanted to find again later. You can imagine the joy radio listeners experienced when the single tuning dial systems became available in the late 1920s.

[Valecnik]

Greg,

Your analogy to safe cracking is a good one. You'd need a lot of patience to be a channel surfer with these early ones. All the dials need to be pretty much in the right place before you hear anything and then the fine tuning comes from there.

And fairly expensive too I found reference to this model being available in 1924 for $310 dollars, comparable then to the upper end of the phonograph range.

And then there were those three batteries to fiddle with too. Three different types of batteries were requrired.