Glad you liked it, Can't seem to work out why i have kept somethings from my past and lost others. I feel another deep dive in the loft is needed to see what else there is.
I can remember the ZN414 when it came out, i think i got one at some point but can't remember if i did anything with it. There were so many new things at that time it was hard to know what to build next.
I will have to keep digging i'm sure i've a calculator somewhere. Not sure if keeping things for such a long time is a good idea as the other half keeps trying to throw my old stuff away. 😞
Thanks for having basically the only video on this. I saw it shown in an ad in another video and wanted to see one actually held in someones hands and working. Im 22 and the tiny AA powered fm radios were still kinda neat even in the ipod age when i was a kid.
I’m glad you found it, watched and enjoyed it, and I’m glad that I never felt the need to throw it away. When I connected it to a power supply and heard the few channels it could pick up, memories of being a school kid with it stuck in my pocket came flooding back. The single earpiece and lack of audio quality did not take anything away from the pop music of the time. How times have changed.
Just got one of these to repair and it has suffered pretty bad from corrosion. The antenna fell onto the table when I opened the lid. The trimmer capacitor top plate fell off when disassembled to clean. I managed to find a NOS trimmer capacitor that looks identical but Sinclair modified it by flipping the bolt upside down so the knob does the trimming. I assume I do not want to unwind the magnet wire on the antenna in order to solder the wires back on the board and rather run new wires from the PCB to the magnet wires ? 🤔
I believe that as well as reflexing, the radio also has regeneration formed by the parasitic coupling between L2 and L1. Some people had issues with the kit radios and the remedy was often to bend the leads on L2 to increase/decrease the amount of positive feedback! This is a textbook case of electronic approaches to avoid if you want robustness of operation, but the little radios seem to work to a fashion and they needed very few components.
I can't remember if it was any good? it was so long a go. the wires on the battery connections means that I used it enough to require a bigger battery supply. I hope you liked the walk down memory lane.
That schematic capture software looks like Proteus. If you have the licensing, maybe you could run a simulation by injecting a suitably specified modulated signal.
😍😍 gracias por el video la otra vez abrí mi radio solo tenía un circuito integrado no tiene bobinas ni capacitor variable con 2botones buscas la señal y es imposible saber cómo funciona
Gracias por el comentario, las radios modernas no dan idea de lo que sucede internamente en los circuitos integrados. Al menos con componentes discretos, puede ver el pensamiento puesto en el diseño. Con esta radio se trata de hacer mucho con muy pocos componentes. Espero que el traductor de Google haga un buen trabajo con esto.
A very typical Sinclair product - a piece of junk that *just* manages to hold it together to work! It works - but in a horrible way! My father built one for me - and I used to listen to it in bed when I couldn't sleep...so this holds some odd memories for me! He also built a Sinclair scientific calculator for me - the one that could take over a minute to calculate some trig functions! Fortunately, I got a temporary job while waiting to go to college - and earned enough to splurge outrageously buy myself an HP 67 ... which is still one of the best calculators ever made!
Sinclair was a bit of a master at it, getting more out of something than it should. Except for the C5 which was to close to a toy to make its place in the world. Time have changed so much that its hard to see if this style of product creation will ever happen again.
@@TheEmbeddedHobbyist Yeah...the old ZX-80 and 81 keyboards were those really bad 'snap connection' buttons - and people hated them. On the next computer, the Spectrum - he claimed to have added a proper keyboard. Turned out to be a rubber mat that pushed down on the old-style keyboard - which got warm and kinda coated with sweat - that had a really bad "Recently dead flesh" feel to it. When people complained about that, Sinclairs next computer (the "QL") again claimed to have a full keyboard - and what they did was to put thin plastic caps over the rubber mat, over the ZX-80 keyboard. At each time, he resisted doing the one thing his customers wanted. Then, there were the problems with his excessive claims - he said that the QL would come with twin "Floppy drives" - for the time, a pair of floppy disk drives would have cost more than the price of the entire computer - so people were amazed. Then, it became clear that he was using the phrase "Floppy Tape" (what does that mean? Isn't all tape "floppy"?) - and the resulting contraption was essentially a quarter-sized version of an 8 track audio tape - with insanely narrow tape that wore out amazingly quickly - and had perpetual alignment problems. It was almost impossible to use a tape recorded on your A drive in your B drive because the heads weren't identically aligned. This in turn made it impossible to sell software on "floppy tape" because it wouldn't read on the customer's drive. The machine was a disaster. He also claimed it was a 16 bit machine...it did have a 16 bit CPU - but only 8 bit RAM - so every 16 bit memory fetch required two operations - which made it no faster than an 8 bit machine. His disasters were always like that though - he'd claim that something existed, and promote the heck out of it BEFORE he'd finished developing it...and when he found he couldn't build what he'd claimed at that price - he'd find a kludge to get around it. Urgh! The C5 started out life as a GENUINE effort to build a proper electric car (with 4 wheels and a roof) - but as he found it increasingly impossible to source the parts and manufacture the thing, it got stripped down and down until it couldn't pass the regulations for a street-legal car. At which point, it became a power-assisted recumbent tricycle! When Sinclair started out - with the radio, the black watch and the portable TV, his products weren't TOO terrible - but as time got on, they got worse and worse. The QL computer and the C5 were the final nails in the coffin - it reached a point where nobody would believe a single word he said and his products became a running joke.
@@SteveBakerIsHere As you may have seen i have the radio and the black watch. Somewhere i might still have two of his calculators but i can't find them. I wish i still had my MK14 and video board which i lost to a friend somehow 😞 I had a ZX80 a long time after they were made but not sure what happened to it. Also the Jupitor Ace which was made from a breakaway from his design team i think. Another one i miss losing. But i have no Amstrad junk so i'm safe on that count. 🙂
I bought a Sinclair Cambridge calculator as soon as I could afford one, after leaving school. It used to go through batteries like no one's business, and was really not much more than a curiosity piece. I still have it, together with the hard nylon case, tucked away in a drawer.
This was one of my first electronic kits I ever made. Thank a lot it brings back a lot of memories.
Glad you liked it, Can't seem to work out why i have kept somethings from my past and lost others. I feel another deep dive in the loft is needed to see what else there is.
As a young teenager, I owned a Sinclair micro 6 radio and it worked very well.
Sinclair had some good engineers working with him and they did produce some good kit.
I built one and thought I was the coolest. Smuggled the earpiece up my school blazer and was rocking out instead of lessons.
I was surprised mine still works after all those years.
IT HAD A ZN414 , LOOKS LIKE A TRANSISTOR BUT IS A 10 TRANSISTOR RADIO FRONT END INSIDE.
I can remember the ZN414 when it came out, i think i got one at some point but can't remember if i did anything with it. There were so many new things at that time it was hard to know what to build next.
No, it was a 2-transistor reflex design. I'm very familiar with the ZN414 as I started with Ferranti, but this wasn't one of the applications!
@@stevenbirch ah, nice little chip though.
So cool you still have that !....cheers.
I will have to keep digging i'm sure i've a calculator somewhere. Not sure if keeping things for such a long time is a good idea as the other half keeps trying to throw my old stuff away. 😞
Thanks for having basically the only video on this. I saw it shown in an ad in another video and wanted to see one actually held in someones hands and working.
Im 22 and the tiny AA powered fm radios were still kinda neat even in the ipod age when i was a kid.
I’m glad you found it, watched and enjoyed it, and I’m glad that I never felt the need to throw it away. When I connected it to a power supply and heard the few channels it could pick up, memories of being a school kid with it stuck in my pocket came flooding back. The single earpiece and lack of audio quality did not take anything away from the pop music of the time.
How times have changed.
I've got one of them, it was a present when i was young
I do wonder how many are still out in the wild, and of them how many still work.
Just got one of these to repair and it has suffered pretty bad from corrosion. The antenna fell onto the table when I opened the lid. The trimmer capacitor top plate fell off when disassembled to clean. I managed to find a NOS trimmer capacitor that looks identical but Sinclair modified it by flipping the bolt upside down so the knob does the trimming.
I assume I do not want to unwind the magnet wire on the antenna in order to solder the wires back on the board and rather run new wires from the PCB to the magnet wires ? 🤔
i don't think I'd want to rewind the coil, just extend to the ends if possible. great to see another saved.
@ ok cool thanks for the advice.
I believe that as well as reflexing, the radio also has regeneration formed by the parasitic coupling between L2 and L1. Some people had issues with the kit radios and the remedy was often to bend the leads on L2 to increase/decrease the amount of positive feedback! This is a textbook case of electronic approaches to avoid if you want robustness of operation, but the little radios seem to work to a fashion and they needed very few components.
I'll have to have a play with it and see what affect L2 has. will be interesting to find out. Thanks for the comment
Mine is long gone but I've been creating a copy. Unfortunately, the schematics I've found are missing information such as the value of L2.
I've not seen any values either, I not got a working lcr meter so I can't measure it for you. Sorry
@@TheEmbeddedHobbyist After mocking up the circuit, 2.2 mh seems to work the best passing the audio while blocking the RF.
Ha, I had one of those in the early 70s. Tho if you'd asked me 5 minutes ago, I wouldn't have realized it was a Sinclair!!!
I can't remember if it was any good? it was so long a go. the wires on the battery connections means that I used it enough to require a bigger battery supply. I hope you liked the walk down memory lane.
That schematic capture software looks like Proteus. If you have the licensing, maybe you could run a simulation by injecting a suitably specified modulated signal.
Hi It was produced on KiCad, not sure how good KiCad is running a simulation. I could end up spending a lot of time just trying to model the coils.
Good video.
Thank U to share it.
===
Thanks for the comment, it's nice when somebody takes to the time to comment that they liked it.
@@TheEmbeddedHobbyist : I think the same.
Many people don't spend 60 seconds thanking content creators... making videos takes time and some effort.
I make them for fun so reading great comments makes it all worthwhile @@Bufalo700
😍😍 gracias por el video la otra vez abrí mi radio solo tenía un circuito integrado no tiene bobinas ni capacitor variable con 2botones buscas la señal y es imposible saber cómo funciona
Gracias por el comentario, las radios modernas no dan idea de lo que sucede internamente en los circuitos integrados. Al menos con componentes discretos, puede ver el pensamiento puesto en el diseño. Con esta radio se trata de hacer mucho con muy pocos componentes. Espero que el traductor de Google haga un buen trabajo con esto.
A very typical Sinclair product - a piece of junk that *just* manages to hold it together to work! It works - but in a horrible way! My father built one for me - and I used to listen to it in bed when I couldn't sleep...so this holds some odd memories for me!
He also built a Sinclair scientific calculator for me - the one that could take over a minute to calculate some trig functions! Fortunately, I got a temporary job while waiting to go to college - and earned enough to splurge outrageously buy myself an HP 67 ... which is still one of the best calculators ever made!
Sinclair was a bit of a master at it, getting more out of something than it should. Except for the C5 which was to close to a toy to make its place in the world. Time have changed so much that its hard to see if this style of product creation will ever happen again.
@@TheEmbeddedHobbyist Yeah...the old ZX-80 and 81 keyboards were those really bad 'snap connection' buttons - and people hated them. On the next computer, the Spectrum - he claimed to have added a proper keyboard. Turned out to be a rubber mat that pushed down on the old-style keyboard - which got warm and kinda coated with sweat - that had a really bad "Recently dead flesh" feel to it. When people complained about that, Sinclairs next computer (the "QL") again claimed to have a full keyboard - and what they did was to put thin plastic caps over the rubber mat, over the ZX-80 keyboard. At each time, he resisted doing the one thing his customers wanted.
Then, there were the problems with his excessive claims - he said that the QL would come with twin "Floppy drives" - for the time, a pair of floppy disk drives would have cost more than the price of the entire computer - so people were amazed. Then, it became clear that he was using the phrase "Floppy Tape" (what does that mean? Isn't all tape "floppy"?) - and the resulting contraption was essentially a quarter-sized version of an 8 track audio tape - with insanely narrow tape that wore out amazingly quickly - and had perpetual alignment problems. It was almost impossible to use a tape recorded on your A drive in your B drive because the heads weren't identically aligned. This in turn made it impossible to sell software on "floppy tape" because it wouldn't read on the customer's drive. The machine was a disaster. He also claimed it was a 16 bit machine...it did have a 16 bit CPU - but only 8 bit RAM - so every 16 bit memory fetch required two operations - which made it no faster than an 8 bit machine.
His disasters were always like that though - he'd claim that something existed, and promote the heck out of it BEFORE he'd finished developing it...and when he found he couldn't build what he'd claimed at that price - he'd find a kludge to get around it.
Urgh!
The C5 started out life as a GENUINE effort to build a proper electric car (with 4 wheels and a roof) - but as he found it increasingly impossible to source the parts and manufacture the thing, it got stripped down and down until it couldn't pass the regulations for a street-legal car. At which point, it became a power-assisted recumbent tricycle!
When Sinclair started out - with the radio, the black watch and the portable TV, his products weren't TOO terrible - but as time got on, they got worse and worse.
The QL computer and the C5 were the final nails in the coffin - it reached a point where nobody would believe a single word he said and his products became a running joke.
@@SteveBakerIsHere As you may have seen i have the radio and the black watch. Somewhere i might still have two of his calculators but i can't find them. I wish i still had my MK14 and video board which i lost to a friend somehow 😞
I had a ZX80 a long time after they were made but not sure what happened to it. Also the Jupitor Ace which was made from a breakaway from his design team i think. Another one i miss losing.
But i have no Amstrad junk so i'm safe on that count. 🙂
I bought a Sinclair Cambridge calculator as soon as I could afford one, after leaving school. It used to go through batteries like no one's business, and was really not much more than a curiosity piece. I still have it, together with the hard nylon case, tucked away in a drawer.
The janky charm of sinclair products is what always sells it for me...plus they were cheap cheaper cheap!