G'day all.

I just wanted to point out that the current ROTW is not a KM Mickey, but rather a short-wave GKM Mickey. As far as I know the Astor models using the same style cabinet is as follows:- DL, KL, KM, GKM & HPM. (If there are any others please let us know)

Most of the ROTW featured here have a name like Radiolette, Baby or Mickey, etc, but lack their model designations - which I believe is the most important information.

How about also including a link to circuit diagrams, user manuals, sales brochures, newspaper ads from Trove, etc for each ROTW featured here if the material is available. I think that would be a great idea.

It is a great idea and you are correct about the model number. This is in fact the shortwave Mickey, with the band switch on the back. Over the past six months or so I have been quietly collecting circuit diagrams, mostly by way of the remaining AORSMs that I couldn't get hold of until recently. I am lead to believe that some volumes are harder to get than others.

When I can purchase a suitable scanner I will not only be adding circuit diagrams and other data to ROTW but will generally start populating the site with the contents of the AORSMs. I also have some of the JR television circuit diagrams and plan on doing something similar with these.

Astor used a wide variety of tuning dials on these Mickeys though there were only two cabinet styles that I know of. The variations in these are detailed in the following article:-

Valve Radio Model Lifecycles

There might be a space to put a link to a *.jpg of the circuit with the description, or a link to a page. I did make a point of sending circuits with some photos of Radio's recently, with that idea in mind. Many of these sets have wandered through the workshop, for repair.

An 11-25 last week had one of the best examples of misguided innovation on a suicide Bakelite mains plug I have seen in ages.

Almost a feature on its own.

I like the idea as well and I know it is something that is being aimed for with the forums evolution.

As far as scanning the AORSM's yourself Brad, that's admirable especially for models where the original service manual is no longer available. Scans of the original manuals will always be preferable to the AORSM's as the circuits are at full original size as well as the rest of the service information.

There are a few people on these forums who have collections of original manuals who have already done the hard work and scanned them who I'm sure are willing to share the scans with you.
A case in point is the JR B&W TV manuals. I've scanned the entire set of these plus all the supplements, a process that took the best part of a year to do. I'm quite happy to send you a DVD of the scans for you to use as you see fit with the proviso that they are freely distributed and no attempt is made to sell the files. For you to go and do the scanning again is a waste of your time when I'm sure you have other things you'd rather be doing.

Crowd sourcing is always going to be more effective at building an information library than one person trying to do it all on their own!

G'day TV Collector,

The idea of scanning came about because in the past I've made numerous attempts to have such material donated but with almost nothing in the way of commitments. I didn't really understand why this was the case and simply assumed that people weren't willing to temporarily part with material (as I didn't own any hard copies back then) or perhaps people felt that their copy of material should be subject to some sort of limited availability - shared with friends and family only, etc.

In more recent times, some members here, yourself included have been quite generous with donating circuit diagrams and other service data. It seems like a small figure but I count 96 files in the Documents folder on the server, though before I introduced this folder and the conversion of JPG copies of circuits to PDF, I was simply embedding the JPGs in member's comments so there'd be at least double that number of available circuits.

My plan for a more or less unlimited supply of circuits and service information would be as follows:-

1. All files would be available on this site, with credit to the member providing it, linked from an index in alphabetical order based on brand, model name then model number. This is just so things are easy to find. Files would then in order by circuit diagram, service manual, owner's manual.
2. A photo of a typical specimen of each radio and television would accompany any links to the above data, where available.
3. All files, apart from photos, would be in PDF format so all types of computers and phones can view the files.
4. It would go without saying that all content would be freely available to members. No fee would ever be chargeable for any of the above content.

I am yet to construct the pages that would support this section of the site though this shouldn't take too long once a plan is hatched to decide the best way to go about it. It'll be easier than one or two of the other things I've wanted to do here for a long time. The actual download files in this section of the website would not be available to guests - this will stop search engines thieving the files but the benefit to those searching for the information would be from the link pages being crawlable by the search engines.

I'm also happy to hear suggestions from others about all of this.

I think Kevin Chant is trying to do similar & I have fed him some circuits I have drawn, as there are no others.

Marc

The actual download files in this section of the website would not be available to guests - this will stop search engines thieving the files

A problem that Kevin told me that he has faced is that people bulk download the files on his site and then advertise them for sale. I'm not sure how he has dealt with that.

As for sharing information, I'm always happy to provide whatever I can privately, but I am not prepared to publish schematics as I certainly do not own the copyright on them, and I'll leave informed discussion of the subject of copyright to a lawyer, which I am not.

Unfortunately, there are the greedy who like to hoard etc. & see a way of making money, or gaining advantage, exploiting others without doing any real work themselves.

Marc

GTC, I don't think copyright is a significant issue in this case, it's more about preserving and distributing a part of Australian technological history. This sort of information is beyond what the national archives can be bothered with, so unless people like ourselves make an effort to do something about digitizing the information, it will end up being lost.
The information in the service manuals is obsolete and no longer of commercial value and I doubt that there would be much interest in pursuing copyright even if it did still exist. Large companies such as HP and Tektronix make their obsolete service manuals available free of charge. Philips (Europe) has no objection to the free distribution of obsolete service data as long as you do not charge for it.
As a precaution it would be wise for Brad to do some basic checks to satisfy himself about distributing the material and it would be a simple matter to approach companies such as AWA and Philips.

All my scans have been done as JPG's as it is an universal and open standard that will be around for long time to come. PDF's are a necessary evil, it's a convenient, universal standard but propriety and subject to the whims of Adobe. Still it does have advantages such as being able to lock the file with author information so attempts at unauthorised distribution (selling) can't pass the files off as their own.

The easiest way of getting what I have to you Brad is if you set up a FTP account for me. As you are running your own server this should be easy enough to do and all I need to do is upload files to you as they are ready. I'll need to convert the things to pdf's so it will need to be done over a period of time.
Otherwise I can mail you the files on DVD's or other means.

I like the basic outline on how it will be managed. By having the requirement to have people signed in to download files is a necessary requirement to stop people "leeching" files as GTC has mentioned. Unfortunately there are always people who'll abuse such a resource and you could impose a daily data size limit or file count limit (a better option) to prevent this. When I was doing the Astor TV galleries, the idea of having linked circuit information was something I would have loved to do.

We just need to agree on some file formats etc and how the data is to be sent to you Brad. Otherwise I don't see any reason why this can't get up and running soon.

GTC, The touchy subject of copyright can indeed discourage people who worry about whether they may end up in hot water or not and I've worried a bit about the same thing in the past. I've recently been told by an IP solicitor that we can do the AORSMs as the copyright owner no longer exists but it is fair to say they weren't the only publishers of information. I seriously doubt that existing companies such as AWA, Philips, EMI and Breville would worry as this all happened so long ago and there'd be no loss of revenues to them by us keeping their old documentation alive and kicking.

Marc, I agree. Making money out of this is not a kosher activity in my books, especially when the material is bludged off other people. This is why I will do two things here. As mentioned before I would make the content available to members only. The other thing I'll do is log the downloading of files to make sure people aren't just signing up to grab everything. If this did take place it would hog the connection. Putting in place a mechanism to regulate such downloading for new members and give the more long-standing contributors to this site a greater amount of latitude may be a fair thing.

TV Collector, Providing an FTP account is easy enough. You face two big hurdles though. Firstly, I've noticed that your ISP bills you for uploads as well as downloads in a similar way to Telstra. The other is that it'll take a long, long time. If you have everything on a disc then it would be best to post it as I can transfer the contents to the server at a greater speed as I could do this directly on the server. Once the transfer is done I can post it back. I wouldn't worry too much about converting the files. I can contribute time to this and apply this site's naming convention to the files at the same time. I can give you my postal address when the time comes.

This is one of the reasons I loved the British Imperial awards. It was British subtlety at its best & often a character reference that the dullards never understood.

KBE: Tended to be to self made man (genus) who achieved something in their life.

OBE: (Other B...... Efforts was often the one who got the glory from using other people.

Marc

Brad earlier in this post you said something about not charging for downloads or something to that effect. I would only be too happy to make donations to this site because I believe the work you are doing is quite extraordinary. it must be costing you something ?. I'm not in favour of membership fees but would be happy to make a small donation as I think you will find most members here agree with me on this. If you are going to put schematics up for us to down load when needed then you are doing us a great service.

A few people have offered to donate money to help with the running of the site in the past, though I will respectfully decline these, again, as I have done in the past, because my reward is to simply see a site that is being used by as many as possible as much as possible.

It doesn't cost anything in terms of website development because I take care of that myself, and though this has one or two disadvantages the advantages do outweigh them. I also do the hosting of the site myself and this saves a fortune on payments for commercial webspace. Again there's ups and downs, the big downer is that bandwidth is not as generous though the upside is that I have unlimited data transfers and my webspace is three terabytes. All of that is not likely to get used of course. So the financial outlay is rather low for what I get out of the current situation.

I can also give two guarantees:-

1. Advertising banners will never come back to this website. Never ever. I'll add that this site is one of few of the vintage radio forums around the world that don't run ad campaigns.
2. No-one will ever get charged a membership or access fee.

I do twelve hour shifts as a security guard and I tell you its great to have something like this which assists me in learning about my hobby. there is a lot of slow time in my job and I dont like wasting time . this is a invaluable site for me .

Advertising banners will never come back to this website.

I'm not all that fussed by advertising banners. I can use an ad blocker if they bug me.

Does this site use tracking cookies? Reason I ask is that a while back I was running a browser add-on that alerted me to tracking cookies, and I believe I saw one associated with this site?

I had to stop using that add-on as it was making things very slow.