Bill Bird wrote:

RBC-5 picks up only very strong stations like Radio Havana.

Outside of chassis and shield of antenna cables on both receivers seems to have
about 60 volts AC on them.

You have very leaky capacitor issues. First of all you will probably find
an RF filter on the incoming power line made with a couple shunt caps.
If those caps are paper types, they are leaky and this is almost certainly
the source of the AC on the case. Replace those caps.

The poor RF performance and the leaky filter caps make me suspect that
you have a lot of other paper caps inside that have gone bad. Be VERY
careful of coupling caps used for DC blocking on the IF cans... replace
them immediately before they go bad and destroy an irreplaceable IF
transformer.

I will be opening up the units soon to take a look. I have two tube testers
and a VTVM for testing.

The tubes are almost certainly fine but it won't hurt to check them. You
will find a DVM is more convenient than a VTVM, but my basic feeling about
paper caps is that you're better off replacing them now rather than testing
them, replacing the bad ones now, and then having to replace the rest of
them later.

The orange drop types are reasonable replacements for a decent price,
but there are plenty of other good alternatives.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."