Fine Tuning: A Radio Repair Shop

Fine Tuning is a little radio repair shop in an English town in 1952. The wirelesses come in over the counter with whatever their owners have noticed, one with a hum and another that's gone quiet, and it's your job to find out what's really wrong with each one at the bench and put it right before its owner comes back for it.

Every set is a working valve superhet, and the game solves its circuit as you work on it, so the meter reads what the circuit really does and what you hear comes from the same sums. A drying capacitor makes it hum, a dead valve stays cold, a dry joint crackles when you tap the chassis, an IF transformer out of alignment leaves the station mushy until you trim it back, and a reservoir capacitor gone short blows the fuse, and the new one after it too if you fit it before you've found the short.

Some of the damage you can see once the back's off, a resistor charred black by a short further along or a valve with its glass cracked and its getter gone white. Some sets are harder going too, like the one that whistles on every station because whoever had it last put plain wire where a screened lead should be, or a set that's been stood somewhere damp. There are two sets so far, the Pemberton Five, sold under four makers' names in walnut, brown or ivory Bakelite and light oak, and Selvox's little Novatone Companion, an AC/DC set whose chassis is live to the mains, so it goes through the isolating transformer on the bench before you put a hand in it.

None of the work's done with buttons: you loosen the knobs, turn the set round and take its back off, slide the chassis out and plug the bench speaker in, then drag the meter's probes onto the pins and tags, listen down the line with the signal tracer, pull valves, free joints with the soldering iron and fit new parts from the parts cabinet, and if a wire's in the wrong place you take hold of it and move it, or lay in a new one off the reels. The service sheet has the circuit diagram on it, pointing at a wire lights up everything it's joined to, and the repair handbook on the bench takes you from the tools to finding the fault.

There are fourteen stations on the dial. London's three, the Home, the Light and the Third, are on their real 1952 timetable, so there's the pips before the news, dance bands, theatre organs, hymns with a choir and an orchestra of an evening, all made as the set plays and all coming through its circuit, which means a set with something wrong with it sounds like it. The regions come in fainter further round the dial, and after dark Luxembourg and the stations abroad come up and fade in and out, while the Light goes rough now and then as its far transmitters come in on top of it. Leave your own set on at home and it plays away while you work.

The morning paper comes through the letterbox with the town's news and small ads from people whose sets have gone wrong, and the ones you circle bring them in. Their tickets go in the book and up on the cork board, you stamp them DONE and take the money in pounds and pence when they collect, and the rent man calls once a week. Every set that goes out leaves its carbon in the ticket book, with what was done to it and what it was charged. Some want theirs back in a hurry and pay extra if it's ready, and some will only go to so much, so what's worth mending is up to you. Spares come off the wholesaler's trade list by post, to be unwrapped at the counter and put away in the parts cabinet, and so does better equipment once you can afford it, like a signal generator or a meter that reads ohms. The shop keeps proper hours with half-day closing on a Wednesday, the street outside lights up as it gets dark, and when you've finished for the day you climb the ladder to the loft and sleep till seven.

Buy a charger off the trade list and a card goes up in the bay window, and before long the homes with no mains are bringing their accumulators in, each regular on their own day, swapping a flat cell for the one you charged last time. You read each one with the hydrometer, and top it up or clean its terminals when it needs it, and over the counter there are HT and grid-bias batteries, portable packs and gramophone needles for whoever comes in off the street after them.

Order a spoilt set off the trade list, sold as seen, and mend it at the bench like any other. Then take it home to the cupboard by your armchair and tune it in of an evening with the clock ticking over the chair, or put it in the bay window with a price on its ticket and see whether someone off the street comes in for it. One that's past saving can be stripped for its valves and parts instead, and they go in the drawer for used parts, where nobody can say they're any good till they're fitted and tried.