OldRadios

The Pilot Milano Stereo-Radiogram was built in South Africa and seems to have been a model specific to this country. Date of construction was probably mid-1950s, but there is very little detail available. Although a stereo amplifier was included, the set had an old BSR mono turntable. The set did not have an FM radio and had Medium-Wave and 3 short-wave bands.

The radio was working on one channel only and was rather dead on all bands. Replacing an ECC83 valve in the defective channel restored its stereo status. The principal cause of the radio's lack of sparkle was (and still is) a fault in the first IF transformer. Normally, this might not be much of a problem, but the transformer had been constructed in such a strange manner with tuning capacitors moulded into the plastic base and microscopic windings on ferrite cores, that it was deemed best to leave it alone. The IF was aligned to 465kHz with some difficulty because of the bad winding and paper capacitors and out of tolerance resistors were replaced. New valves in the RF and IF stages also improved the performance.

These changes all made the set operate reasonably well and it was able to receive broadcast stations on all wavebands. When the chassis was reconnected to its speaker system, the sound quality was spectacular.

The existing mono cartridge in the BSR auto-changer was replaced with a stereo cartridge.