Blaupunkt Bamberg Radio

The radio is a Blaupunkt Bamberg with a cassette player (and recorder) and a second unit for setting the station presets and the microphone.

There right hand control has several settings that were hieroglyphics to me.  These were D, H, ►◄ and îí.  The D and H settings didn't seem to do anything.  The triangular ones allowed me to auto tune by pushing the right button but I couldn't figure out how to do any manual tuning.

Once I got home, I did some research on the web and found a person that has the service manual available.  I also sent an email to Blaupunkt USA which wasn't responded to (so far).  I also sent an email to a Ferrari technical email list that I belong to.  I got an email back from a person in Switzerland that has a 308 with the same radio and his came with the users manual.  Richard kindly scanned each page in color and emailed me the resulting jpg files.

After receiving the pictures, I printed them out and figured out how things were supposed to work.  The triangular symbols are auto-tune with the difference being 'only stations worth to be received are tuned-in ...', i.e. strong stations vs. all stations.  The English translation leaves a little bit to be desired, but after reading some of the translations from the Japanese for my 240Z, I just laugh and continue reading.  The D selection is to use the microphone for recording on the cassette.  The H position is for manual tuning, but that doesn't work.

I also found out how the presets work.  You pull out the appropriate preset on the bottom unit and then turn it to select the station you want.  Then you push it to lock that station in the memory.  You use the band selection button on the radio and it always goes to the matching preset station.  The other interesting anomaly is that the AM band (520-1605 kHz) is split into two bands on the radio, 520-920 and 900-1605.  So you have to select the correct button (AM1 or AM2) depending on the station frequency you want.  That also means that the auto tune will only search the lower or upper portion of the AM band at any one time.  Since the presets do work and I can manually tune a station using them, I presume that the manual tuning problem is a minor issue.  One of these days I'll pull the unit and have my brother, the electronics wizard, take a look at it.

Back to the manual.  The pictures were scans of the pages as one would just open and read it, i.e. pages 1 and 2 together, 3 and 4, etc.  I wanted to put together a stapled up manual like the original with front to back pages.  Since any specific piece of paper would have four manual pages on it and two of the pages would be from the front and two from the back, I had to do some picture editing to get the pages so they would print out correctly.  First I made a sample manual from some scrap paper and numbered the pages.

As you can see, page 3 has page 20 next to it.  On the back would be page 2 and 21.  Once I had each picture with the two proper manual pages on it, I had to figure out how to print them front to back.  I also had to use legal paper as the overall length was about 12.5".  My first couple of passes on the printer had the back side upside down, etc.  I eventually figured how to turn the paper, but I also had to invert the picture for the back side of each sheet.  Finally I got all 24 pages printed properly on 6 pages of paper.

I didn't have any legal sized ink jet quality paper, so there is quite a bit of print thru from each side of the paper.  So I'll need to get some and reprint it, but for now I've got something to put in the car that explains how to use the radio and cassette.

The other item having to do with the radio was to look at the antenna.  It wouldn't go up and down well, frequently stopping in the middle with the clutch clicking away trying to raise or lower it.  Further, it wouldn't go down completely leaving a couple of inches sticking up.  I figured that it was just gunked up with old grease and would just need cleaning and re-greasing.  So I removed the unit and did some testing on the bench.  It turns out that there were a couple of slight kinks and some wavy bends in the tubing.  I spent about an hour or so with a small tubing bender getting everything straight.  Then I used some machinist's blueing where the kinks had been to see where the high spots were.  I took a file and worked on the high places.  In the end, the antenna is back working, fully extending and retracting without the clutch slipping.  Click here for an enthralling movie of the antenna working!