Navy TCS restoration

Got the alignment done. Took about another hour and a half.

Spent about an hour on the alignment of band 1. Only 2 more bands left to align.

The IF alignment is complete :)

Almost done replacing all of the out of tolerance resistors on the Navy TCS-6 receiver.

Got all of the out of tolerance resistors on the main board replaced. Ended up getting the wrong wattage 47K resistor, so I had to make 47K with what I had. Not as pretty as I would like, but it'll work...

Here it is receiving WWV on 10 Mhz.

The TCS set is finally working. It turned out to be something stupid. Nowhere in the net or in the manual does it sat that the transmitter has to be plugged into the power supply in order to operate the receiver. Apparently there are jumpers and a relay that enable the receiver when the transmitter is plugged in. Finally! I've been banging my head on the wall for a week on this issue. The clue was when I turned on the parts receiver with all good tubes and I got the exact same symptoms. That told me it was most likely something to do with the power supply...

Working on the backup TCS receiver. This one is very dirty... I fired it up with all of the tubes from the original TCS, and no dice. Same symptoms, no audio at all. So it is either a problem with the tubes or with the power supply :(

Still working on the TCS receiver. I replaced C205, but it didn't make a difference :( I have some more parts coming on Monday in the mail. May have to start working on the backup TCS-14 receiver.

Found this cool advertisement online.

Hitting a dead end on this receiver. So I went out to the barn and pulled out my two parts units. By examining those, I did locate two more hidden bathtub capacitors. I may try to replace those in my TCS-6. If not, I may try to fire up the best parts receiver and see if it has similar problems and compare the two...

Did some more work on the Navy TCS receiver. I finally located the missing resistor. They were really tricky and added it to the back of the RF gain pot. I then checked the resistances. Now the pin that is supposed to read 1M reads 1.3M. So a little high, but within the ballpark. Next I ran a signal of several hundred micro volts directly into the antenna. No signal was heard. That probably means that the oscillator is not running. Time to read the manual again :(

Did more work on the Navy TCS receiver. Replaced all of the oil filled capacitors. That didn't solve the issue. I'm guessing that something may be wrong with R227, the 1M resistor. However I have not been able to locate it yet :(

Working on the TCS set. Used my tube extender to measure the resistance of all of the pins on each tube. I found 3 big problems. 3 pins were supposed to read over 1 million ohms, but they read only 125,000 ohms. That says something connected to those pins is broken or almost shorted...

I got my tube extender made. Now I can test the voltages on tubes where you can't access the bottom of the socket. All of the tube sockets in the Navy TCS set are inaccessible, so I will use this jig to troubleshoot it.

Did some more troubleshooting on the TCS. All of the tubes are warm, but the audio tube is super hot, like 200 degrees hot... I'm going to have to test the voltages and resistance if the tube pins. However the socket is not accessible from the bottom. So I'm going to build a tube socket extender and tester. Some are available in ebay, but I dont want to pay $150 for one, so I'll just build it out of my junk box parts.

Read some of the manual again and figured out that I had one of the knobs on the wrong position. I did hear a squeal on one frequency, so it's not stone dead. But definitely an issue going on.