Can anyone tell me why my STC 1030 is so quiet? I can hear it picking up the stations but there is just no volume to it.

Could be due to any of a number of reasons. A weak valve, blown volume control potentiometer, shorted or open-circuit condenser, fouled voice coil in the loudspeaker and many more.

Has the radio been restored in the last few years?
When was the last time it was serviced?

Any number of things. Crook output valve, dodgy caps, low HT voltage. Whats the history of the set. Do you have a good aerial and earth setup?

Ben

Ha. Beat me by 7 seconds.

A good topic for the FAQ section.

Agree with GTC - on this forum the Tutorial section is underused so we often find threads going over ground that has been covered before. I know I have often asked questions that have been patiently answered many times before, but the Search doesn't reveal earlier threads and Google doesn't seem to find them reliably, either.

I recall that one of the American vintage radio sites has some good "Troubleshooting" guides that step through the logical stages of isolating common problems - I can't find it in my bookmarks at the moment.

These days Google seems to bury specialist sites in preference to more modern topics, presumably with more market value to advertisers.

Maven

These days Google seems to bury specialist sites in preference to more modern topics, presumably with more market value to advertisers.

The secret to getting found by the crawlers used by Google, etc, is the technique and strategies known as search engine optimization. (I'm sure Brad knows about this.)

I'm sure Brad knows about this.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an old term now and despite the age of the forum software it once lead the way with certain SEO techniques, things that huge sites have only been using for a few years like dynamic meta tags - information that search engines use to help determine page quality.

In a general sense, a search feature (like the one used on forum sites, including this one) will only look for exactly what you type in the search form. EG: if you type the word "valve" and ask for subjects and comments to be searched, every single post with a subject or comment containing that word will be included in the results list, no matter how young or old the post is. Some of the better search features include a function to limit the number of results if the list of results is expected to be quite large. Unfortunately these search features aren't smart enough to include results that might be relevant by associating like meanings for similar or related search terms like "tube", "filament", "heater", "screen grid", etc. I probably have the ability to include something like this here but it would be clunky and inconsistent at best. I don't have the time to do a good job of this and don't have the money to get someone else to do it.

Vintage Radio has been at the top of the listings on Bing, Google and Yahoo for as long as I can remember though this is because the front page has a high ranking value. On any website the front page will have a higher value than the rest of the site. Because the front page is the only one linked to from every single other page on the site and because the front page is generally where all inbound links from other sites go, this is generally why the front page comes out with the better ranking. It takes a lot of hard yakka and development money to get improvements on any other pages of a site. Large companies have even resorted to hiring SEO staff in-house, even when their content management and hosting is handled by outside providers. It is way beyond the scope of a small operation like this though that said, to be the #1 site for the search term "vintage radio" in the leading search engines is a bit of an achievement.

As for Google, they claim that they don't add weight to sites that host their ad campaigns and they might well be correct. Vintage Radio once carried Google AdSense banners on every page here. This went for a couple of years but the trouble was that Google simply didn't pay me enough money for the vast amounts of site space the ad banners consumed and I still had to pay tax on income generated because there was no corporate entity to journal income to and expenses against. At the end of the day I came to the decision to scrap AdSense because it was serving Google better than it served me.

At one time I was even offering front page links to other sites and I was accepting payment for those links. Google redlined this site for a short time because of the subheading "Sponsored Links" as they dislike competing ad campaigns and paid linking. This activity has always made Google a pack of bastards and fortunately Bing and Yahoo don't penalise sites the same way.

In the last few years I've advanced my position a bit at work and this has consumed the time I used to spend on bringing improvements to this site (and the development of a replacement for this site) and this is why such updates have been somewhat scarce of late and any time available has been spent on repairs (such as to the password retrieval) rather than adding luxuries. Writing a new FAQ page, perhaps even including links to pages with more details answers, such as checklists, shouldn't be a problem though. The original page definitely isn't suitable for what we will all come to expect due to its age. It was originally written in 2003.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an old term now

Maybe, but I still see it used in lots of places including job descriptions.

Large companies have even resorted to hiring SEO staff in-house

Case in point.

This [redlining] activity has always made Google a pack of bastards and fortunately Bing and Yahoo don't penalise sites the same way.

Not yet, anyway.