Radio Restoration Made Easy!
by Ron Chester ★ Sunday, December 6, 2020

I've always wanted to do some radio restoration projects. But where to start? Well from what I've read, an old radio is likely to mostly need new capacitors, especially the electrolytic capacitors, which may have dried out. This would give you a receiver that just hums, for example. My novice receiver, a National NC-109, definitely has this problem. I would love to bring it back to life. But would I be able to find replacements caps with the right specs? I had visions of hours spent on the Mouser website looking for just the right electrolytic.

Hayseed Hamfest LLC

Somewhere I stumbled onto this website with a great name. They offer the answer to this whole problem! They sell capacitor kits specific to lots of the classic old radios; by Drake, Hallicrafters, Hammarlund, Heathkit, National, Swan, Zenith and even audio equipment like Fisher, Scott and McIntosh. I checked out their reviews on eham.net and found 22 reviews from 2009 to 2015, ALL of them being five star reviews! Wow.

I can do my NC-109 for $35.95, my Hammarlund HQ-100 for $33.50 or my HQ-180 for $44.50 and my Novice Heathkit DX-20 transmitter for $23.95.

And once I have the DX-20 back in service, I'll stock up on crystals for many spots on 40m for 89 cents each from KC9ONFun, fun, fun!