Our old family radio and my 16mm projector

Saturday, 28 July 2018

Our old family radio and my 16mm projector

Which I could suppose should be titled "they don't make them like they used to", but isn't. The radio was my first hands on bit of technology that I remember. The missing knob is to change the waveband, this radio pulled in many short-wave stations and I loved to spend hours listening to them. As a four-five year old, I would spend hours slowly turning the tuning knob listening to the weird sounds and forigen stations. I would try to transcribe the morse code that I could hear or simply listen to voices from far, far away.
On the facia you can see the BBC supplied stickers when they changed wavelengths and station names in 1967. I still miss the Home service (now BBC Radio 4). And although it still works, I don't use this radio much as it needs an external aerial and the chassis is live so there's 230 volts AC on that spindle poking out. It also make me sad as the warm, slightly muffled tones make me think of long, long ago.
The projector also works although I have managed to lose the mains lead which means that actually it doesn't. It would be interesting to put the image up against the HDTV we have here. The image quality of 16mm Kodachrome is simply stunning and it was a very sad day when Kodak discontinued it a couple of years ago. There is simply no other film like it. It was expensive. £50 for about three mins, but as a once-a-year tart it was lovely. I also have the matching camera - a Filmo 70.

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