• You can now help support WorldwideDX when you shop on Amazon at no additional cost to you! Simply follow this Shop on Amazon link first and a portion of any purchase is sent to WorldwideDX to help with site costs.
  • Click here to find out how to win free radios from Retevis!

Oldest Galaxy base, kinda. Just doesn't say "Galaxy"

nomadradio

Analog Retentive
Apr 3, 2005
7,536
12,400
698
Louisville, KY
www.nomadradio.com
This radio is as old as the Apple Macintosh. Date codes on the chips that have them are 1984.


No, it doesn't say "Galaxy" anywhere on it. But only inside it.

Sorta.

cwMTO5.jpg


This circuit board number doesn't start with the letters "EPT", but it's the same format and the lowest "3600" followed by "10".


fx8UBz.jpg


The older "Excalibur" radios were made by Cybernet in Japan. Not my favorite radio. Had stability issues.

This one says "Taiwan".

VVHDsY.jpg


At the height of CB-radio market hype there was a factory in Taiwan supplying CB radios to a company called Fanon/Courier. Like nearly all name brands of CB radio in the early 80s, they evaporated never to be heard from again. An enterprising Taiwan businessman named Jim Peng bought the factory, forming the start of "Ranger Communications International". At first they did the way Uniden had done back in the day. Supplying radios to retail brands on contract. Don't know who owned the "Excalibur" name but if you see one that says "Colt Excalibur" on the front don't get too excited. It's a 40-channel only legal CB, and not a terribly good one, if memory serves.

Eventually they started putting their name on the outside of the radio.

But this one is old. Came in with a complaint of "poor receive". Found that the power supply was jamming 23 Volts into the radio. This usually blows the speaker-amp chip to the devil. Just made this one sound terrible. Apparently terrible enough to shut it off BEFORE the first overloaded part could go "SNAP!". Decided not to repair the old analog regulator.

YPJ72U.jpg


The small 50-Watt chinese switchmode "bricks" are the most cost-effective cure for this problem. This one was putting some RF hash into the receiver. Only heard on the dummy load, but that's bad enough. A .01uf disc cap each from the V- and V+ DC output terminals was all it took to make the noise go away.


G2UPrC.jpg


In the wide view of the circuit boards above, the upper-right corner reveals a pcb installed where most "black" radios have only an empty rectangular hole with two screw tabs.

2RYcpE.jpg


The "EPT0SSB" number on this board pretty well settles where it came from. The blue relay is the antenna A/B switch. The radio was made with two antenna sockets, but when the relay got flaky it was bypassed to a single antenna socket.

This radio has a Galaxy FC347 external frequency display. The long shielded lead has a lot of capacitance to ground, and would load down the output of the PLL and reduce receiver/transmit performance. Adding a cap with small-enough capacitance to stop the loading would not feed sufficient signal to the counter, and the reading would "dance". Here is a buffer amplifier we hacked to fix this issue. Not happy with how clear the pics show the setup. No schematic. Too simple for that. The left lead of the J310 FET is the drain. It gets two things. A .01uf cap to ground, and a wire to the regulated 9 Volts that powers the PLL section. Center lead is the source. Gets a 330 ohm 1/4W resistor to ground, and a 100pf disc cap. The cap's other end feeds out to the center wire of the counter coax. The right-hand lead is the gate. It gets plastered directly to the output pad of L18, the PLL output. Newer circuit boards have a buffer-amp circuit that feeds the input of the radio's built-in frequency display. This is why.

AMOBGR.jpg


This cured the loading/performance problem.

Didn't include a pic showing how many of the small gray trimmer capacitors had to be tacked on under a tuneable coil with a bad internal cap. This radio has five. Not a record. Does suggest it spent some time in somebody's damp basement since 1985. I'm convinced that humidity exposure is what makes the internal caps in these slug-tuned "cans" go bad.

This radio brings to mind the old saying "More issues than National Geographic". With any luck it will hold together for a while longer down the road.

73
 

So it was Cybernet that copied the Uniden design?
Nope. Cybernet always had their own way of doing things, immediately recognizable as being different from Uniden.

Cybernet never left Japan. They were the contractor for Colt, who used the name 'Excalibur' for their base radios, the USA-legal and the not-so-legal. Then they stopped producing CB radios and concentrated on home-stereo receivers some time in the early 1980s.

So Colt hired this Taiwanese guy to build the next run of their base radio. It has circuits you might think were borrowed from Uniden, especially their Cobra 146/PC122 radios. As the decades went by the resemblances became thinner and thinner.

73
 
Bonjour

Le SUPER STAR 3600 utilise
le PCB SRT-3600-10 = EPT360010Z

@+
Claude
 

Attachments

  • 20180616_201301.jpg
    20180616_201301.jpg
    2.9 MB · Views: 5
  • 20180616_195447.jpg
    20180616_195447.jpg
    2.3 MB · Views: 5
  • 20180616_190833.jpg
    20180616_190833.jpg
    2.5 MB · Views: 5
  • 20180616_190346.jpg
    20180616_190346.jpg
    2.9 MB · Views: 5
  • EPT360010_Z.jpg
    EPT360010_Z.jpg
    487.1 KB · Views: 5
  • Like
Reactions: AudioShockwav

dxChat
Help Users
  • No one is chatting at the moment.
  • @ Mark Malcomb:
    Hello BJ. Been a long time since I've been on. You doing well? Mark Malcomb
  • @ Naysayer:
    I’m
  • @ kingmudduck:
    Hello to all I have a cobra 138xlr, Looking for the number display for it. try a 4233 and it did not work