Oceanic Trafic 1961

Made from wood covered with Rexine and plastic. Made with a high degree of quality as were many radios from this period, production cost must have been heavy. This stubborn beast didn't want to work again, but I insisted. Most electronics with time consuming repair bills are now thrown away, but thank goodness somebody brought this back from France to sell in the UK. The circuit diagram was easy, it's printed and glued inside the cabinet, even with the date the drawing was made. See for yourself, as I have uploaded it for your pleasure.

Alternative versions were made, one with Long Wave instead of the Short Wave bands I read a Blog on-line that somebody wrote about their repair and all though useful in my research it contained many errors that can slow you down and no information about dismantling the item.

The repair
Well where does one start? at the beginning I suppose.. How to take apart, as with all foreign made items they will be assembled in an unfamiliar way to UK, Japan & Holland produced items that I'm more familiar with.  Removal of the cabinet is just 3 screws, two holding the handles on and one underneath in the middle (The one near the edge is for the telescopic aerial) Open the two halves from the rear like a book as cables from the sockets of the rear left will get broken.

Earphone socket and telescopic aerial and above MW (PO) or car aerial socket)

 Once open remove the ear-piece socket nut and un-solder (or un-sodder as the Americans say, lol)  Two wires with spade clips release the tone control if you decide to remove the front. Next remove the battery box with 2 nuts either side if you wish to attach your own battery (advised) one nut is rounded due to lack of space but it has slots for a screw driver. Inside its divided into 3 sections; audio, IF and aerial switching, as seen below.

View when chassis removed from cabinet, also battery box has  removed (new on/off top right)

The Blog I read on-line had described his fault as being on the audio board and the output transformer being O/C  (open circuit), I must admit I went straight to that and thought I had the same fault but indeed it was different. In my case the driver transistor a SFT353 was at fault. Although I took it out and checked it resistance wise on my meter and found it to check OK, I had to replace it as it failed under load I think. I had no audio from the base of the transistor (using audio gen) but had signals at the collector.

Take lots of photos, better than memory when re fitting stuff. (shows faulty driver transistor)

I used an OC81 Mullard transistor as a replacement and it worked fine. Another stumbling block was the volume control/on/off sw  it was open circuit even after cleaning at one end of the pot. This held me up for quite some time.  Finding an off/switch with a 5K resistance and a medium long spindle is not easy these days. Luckily a Bush VTR133 I scrapped many years ago came to my rescue although I wasn't home and dry. The spindle was slightly wider making me file the cabinet hole a little large,r and the wheel for the tuning dial, that for some reason the French decided to fit around the volume control spindle (nightmare) I made that bigger and also the volume knob had to be filed too. Then if that wasn't enough the housing for the pot was wider and blocked the chassis retaining bolt and 2 electrolytic capacitors had to be moved to accommodate, pugh !!! During the final test the 100k skeleton AGC preset pot (R5) was doggy, so I fitted a new one as this adjustment is quite tricky without a smooth control.

I was a little disappointed when the radio arrived, I thought it may have been a leather case, but sadly it was only plastic, but well made and survived 60 years or more. The Short was reception was a little weak and I had to tune-up some of the tuning coils at the input stage, all clearly labeled on the circuit diagram, although PO is translated as MW if that helps. Oceanic were owned by ITT a German company now taken over in 1966, but originally founded by Roger Toutain in 1944, later part of Nokia. The camera used in my Blogs is a Canon Ixus, very handy for close-up work and small in size, you can pick them up quite cheap now used.