Prodyut Bannerjee's SONY ICF2001 running with hiccoughs

I felt great yesterday when I managed to warm up and run a 30 year old SONY ICF2001. It belonged to Prodyut Bannerjee and when it retired in Prodyut's shack he gifted it to me to add to my list of vintage receivers. It did work off and on but had been kept inside a cupboard for well over two years.My interest in this set was revived when in the last DXped everyone complained about overload problem with long wire when connected to small PLL sets.I recollected that this SONY had performed outstandingly well in our last DXpeds of the 80s.

The original SONY 4.5 v power supply was not working and I had a replacement power supply. The commercially available ones have reverse polarity compared to what SONY needs. I had done this modification . I had collected the service manual from the net but I was not daring to open up the set up because it is so crammed inside. I did not want to upset the alignment too.

The first channels to sign on were the FM ones and it was afternoon anyway. The power switch and the FM/AM/SSB toggle switch needed some vigorous twiddling. Then the set was blaring POWER FM 107.8 MHZ for well over five hours! And with superb sound quality ! By evening I hooked it on to an outdoor antenna. The keypad was erratic and initially only the keys "7" and "9" would work. Up and down keys were working fine. So initially all I did was to tour 7 MHz and 9 Mhz bands. BBC was coming in loud so were the Chinese stations. By late evening more of the keys started working 1, 5, 0 etc. DW German on 15610 kHz continued for the whole of its time.By this morning all the keys were working except 3 and 8. My usual morning listening was through this set - BBC Bangla 0030hrs 6075kHz, VOA English 0100hrs 11705 kHz , R.Philipinas 15285 kHz 0200 hrs, AIR 1008 kHz 0230 hrs etc.

With daily warm ups I hope to have this set will be in top form for the next DXped because it performs outstandingly well on the long wire - no overloading !

This set travelled world wide with Prodyut through his voyages as a mariner and logged some historic stations in past. Unfortunately I cannot get in touch with Prodyut, who will be the happiest about it.

(Dr.Supratik Sanatani, Kolkata via bangladx yg)