Rosco and Monochrome, can you please try sending your messages again. I think I have fixed the problem. Don't worry if you have already sent things in parts. I will sort out what has to go where tonight.

Okay, the mail server is now working and Monochrome's manual is linked to from his first comment.

Thanks to everyone for their patience. Mail servers can be difficult to deal with sometimes.

My short term memory is getting worse nowadays, I found that I had soldered a resistor to the wrong tag as well? I didn't have photos for that so thanks again for the service manual. Anyway I checked the 500k ohm balance pot in circuit it measures 465 ohms one way and 201k ohms the other way, I measured from the outside tags and from centre tag to outside tags and I get the same result with the pot turned to either extreme, this doesn't look right to me what do the experts say?

There may be an external bug in the Telstra system it has been behaving strangely recently & having some really slow moments, especially from USA.

I thought it might be here but it is happening to others.

Marc

I have a push in switch that is supposed to lock in until its pushed in again,is there a fix for these,like filing it or changing the spring?

Thanks for the service manual but as always on this site I have to go elsewhere for any help I may need ? I'm not being ungrateful its just that I see a lot of unanswered posts from first timers too, asking for advice and they don't get one reply? It looks to me that there cant be too many people on this site and I can see why its the outdated site itself,for a start,photos cant be uploaded unless they are sent to the owner of the site to be resized! That is one big turnoff I must say.If it was a Bulletin site there wouldn't be such problems and a lot more people would be interacting here.

These switches operate with what I can only describe as a linear ratchet mechanism. If the small spring-loaded control arm inside is cracked then that is the end of the switch unless you are good with custom-building things. It'd be possible to make a replacement out of fibre. Unless you were able to disassemble the mechanism and take a photo it is hard to confirm though.

My goodness Rosco, this forum is without doubt the most helpful and friendly I have ever come across. I have never seen a question by a newcomer go unanswered. Occasionally a more involved question will go unanswered but it is assumed nobody knows the answer. I'd prefer that system than a hundred people replying" I don't know" and "I don't know either"

Our hobby is quite specialised has a very limited following with a dwindling pool of knowledge and I for one am eternally grateful for the advice and professional guidance that members here have taken the time to pass on to me.

A question posed at 1.00AM wasn't replied to by 1.00PM the same afternoon? I'm sure the members here don't sit in front of their computers 24 hours a day waiting for questions to pop up. Patience is a virtue and as you were typing your last message someone was taking time out of their day to reply to your question. I myself tend to 'digest' the new posts once a day. If I'm capable of answering a question I'll think about it for a while before posting. I did happen to see your post early this morning but wasn't in a position to reply. My answer would be similar to Brad's. In my experience, once they're broke, they're broke.

As a webmaster of three different websites myself, including forums, I can appreciate first hand how much rubbish robots and people can attempt to load onto a website. About 10 years ago one of my sites was hacked overnight with all product images being replaced by porn and pornographic links riddling the site. As I was busy that morning and hadn't checked the website I wasn't alerted to the problem til a customer walked into the shop and told me. That experience leads me to understand the restrictions placed on this forum. Our posts here are published immediately and un-moderated which is more than I and a lot of other forums allow. Automated moderation has serious drawbacks.

This forum is independently hosted and run at considerable expense by a private individual with no advertising. Maintenance such as what has been carried out over the past week is unavoidable. I worked for many years as a mainframe computer tech at customer sites and upgrades/relocations were always fraught with danger, even for customers paying millions of dollars. A few quickly solved server issues is nothing. Thanks Brad!

If you do know of another resource specialising in the restoration of vintage valve radios better than what we have here, could you please share it with us?

Rosco,

It looks like I missed your most recent posting, as I was replying to one of your other questions at the time you posted.

This is not the first time you have made such comments and whilst I always appreciate feedback there are just some things that I simply do not have the time to implement. I am not some sort of mystery figure who is attached to a computer 24/7 - I live a normal life. There is work, meals, associating with family and friends, holidays and the like.

It may interest you to know that there is an image uploading facility on this site and, yes, the reason it is turned off is two-fold.

1. At the time of development there was a serious flaw in Internet Explorer where a dangerous JavaScript file could be disguised as a JPG image and when rendered by Internet Explorer it could do whatever the author of the file wanted - basically anything from posting a warning dialogue with a scary message to deleting your hard disc.
2. There was no automatic resizing available without using a third party DLL file which I could not verify the safety of. It also cost money.

Since then, the very capable ASP.NET web environment has been released by Microsoft which does just about anything that can be done on a website. But as I said, I do not have the time to convert this site - the project is just too big with the time available and I do not have several thousand dollars available to employ a .NET programmer.

Off the shelf forum software 'could' be a solution but most of it is not designed to run on a Windows server. Many of the offerings either cost money for a licence, as is the case with vBulletin, or have security weaknesses which I do not want to host here for obvious reasons. The forums here have the strongest anti-spam measures that exist on any forums anywhere and this is why as an administrator, I do not have to spend my day closing hostile accounts. I'd like to be able to provide as much as possible and make everyone happy but like anything else in life it is a case of getting the priorities right.

On the positive, this website has been the busiest in the last week or so than at any other time with a few hundred comments being posted - nothing excites me more.

There is a good reason why this website is the only Australian based online community for vintage radio (that I am aware of) and that is because slapping off-the-shelf forum software on a budget webserver in a far off land and hoping that it'll run itself are over. Of course if you think I am wrong then I invite you to prove it with some action that speaks louder than words. A bit of competition never hurt anyone.

Getting back to one of the matters you raise, yes, when there is sufficient time available to me, members will once again be able to post images here without the need to e-mail them and I do realise that all members would love to have this. In the meantime you are not going to break a fingernail by booting up your e-mail programme.

Scraps is also correct regarding the answering of questions. All questions are answered where an answer is known. Of the approx. 1,600 members, a good 400 are active here.

If I win the $22m in Lotto tonight I can personally guarantee a new site in double-quick time.

Please let me second, third and fourth the replies from Scraps and our administrator, Brad.
This is the most well run and friendly forum I have ever experienced.
Harold

I see a lot of unanswered posts from first timers too

Dunno about that! However, I've seen plenty of one-timer posts asking for information, receiving it and not even the courtesy of a "thank you" in return.

Not to mention one-timers who ask us for information about a particular set, receive researched replies and then immediately list the set on eBay never to be heard of again.

Following on from that, the only new member questions that I will no longer answer are those asking for the value of a radio/radiogram.

Otherwise I'm happy to provide whatever help I can.

And I also heartily endorse Brad's efforts. He supports this site out of his own pocket.

OK,I'm with you. I didn't realise that there was so much work involved running a site like this.I meant what I said in a positive light. If you did what other sites do and charge an annual members fee the money problem disappears. Brad could employ some people to help with the work and he could buy a monocle and riding crop to go with it. LOL But seriously,$5 to register, that will take care of the scammers & spammers etc...I would pay $25/$50 a year for membership no worries. You could have advertising for non paying annual members and make some more money there as well. Why not run a poll and see what others think about it? Oh I nearly forgot what can I use to replace 1uf,200volt Ducon Type,TPB 264 capacitor?

Don't have reference to type? Axial, Chassis type, polarised or not?

If it is electrolytic use a 450V

The people who contribute to this site, do it as a service & are under no obligation to do it, and it is in their own time.

Marc

Some forums get away with charging upto $20 and this is fine but the problem is that the catchment isn't big enough in Australia to make it worthwhile on a vintage radio website. There's just not enough people.

One other thing is that forums that offer a 'premium service' in exchange for a membership fee, donation, contribution, etc are then offering a product for fee or reward under the Trade Practices Act, even if they do not give this legality any consideration. The onus is then on the webmaster to ensure that they are offering something of merchantable quality at all times and to the satisfaction of all involved.

It's beyond the scope of what I ever wanted to achieve with this website, which is just to bring like-minded people together for a common good. This site used to carry advertising which helped with the running costs but advertising rates fell over time and the space on the site the banners took up made that exercise unviable too. I don't remember the date the site went 'commercial-free' though I am sure I announced it at the time. All I remember was that it was a long time ago.

Most members probably don't remember the two original forums here, which didn't succeed. I don't remember the names of the forums but I do have the original file here somewhere. The thirteen we have here now are doing a lot better.

The bad:

Need time to develop image management from scratch. I don't want it to be a simply upload feature with nothing else. A photo album for each member where they can manage all images they use in posts plus their avatars is more along the lines of what I want to see here, with images left at the size they were uploaded at and the forum software resizing automatically to fit within the confines of the template. I started this some time back but then changed jobs and had to give it away. It will get a revisit at some stage.

The good:

A comprehensive spammer eradication system is employed here. It's not database driven but instead hard-coded into the registration engine. It stops 99.9% of automated signups even before the robots complete the signup process. All this is done without those horrendous Captcha thingos where you have to type a series of letters and numbers to prove you are a real person. The spam robots can defeat those things now anyway with character recognition. The trick is to employ traps that robots do not understand because the robot's controllers don't know how the hidden tricks work. The one or two that get through each year are usually banned before they get to say anything.

One thing I think people like here is the things that I let go. Some, actually most, forums bar the use of derogatory terms like "Ebay" when referring to Ebay and the like. I couldn't care less about it because there are just some things that are not worth worrying about. I also allow people to post auction links whereas it is a strict no-no on other forums. In fact, it is openly encouraged here provided it is put in the Wanted and For Sale forum and the auction is relevant to vintage radio or other subjects covered here. I also don't mind conversations in long threads wandering off-topic provided the original poster's query has been answered. Doing that elsewhere scored the culprit a ban.

One other thing I think that members here like is the lack of prying eyes. I consider myself one of the boys and only act in the role of Administrator when absolutely necessary. I've only ever appointed one staff member here who holds the rank of Acting Administrator. When I am not around he pops on now and then just to make sure there's been no disasters. This forum software allows for five ranks of Moderator staff below the two ranks mentioned but I've never seen the need to make use of them. I think many here feel good knowing they can come and go without strap-happy moderators lording it over them. That isn't to say we'd never see Moderators here - there's a place for them if they are the right people who fit into the ethos I want the site to run by. But at the moment the place runs itself, generally to the satisfaction of a majority of members. No need to fix what ain't broke.

One thing Marc said is worth noting too. The members make one hell of a contribution here, particularly the more regular members. Good, close-knit forums cannot be a success without their invaluable input.