The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Electrical Bay Bench Testing AD Radio

I got a radio it is supposed to work, my truck is all taped up ready for paint but I want to bench test the radio. The truck is 12 v so I have a 12 v to 6 v converter 20 amp. My plan is to test the radio using the trucks 12 volt battery and the converter. Seems like it should work. is this correct? also when I plug the antenna in (it is not attached to the truck, just laying on the bench) do I have to ground it or does the antenna cable take care of that ?

sorry for the dumb questions but I don't want to blow up a working radio....

Thanks

I used a 6-volt battery charger to run a radio in the basement.. Don't know if that's approved.

You aren’t doing anything fundamentally wrong
Your setup should not cause damage
The antenna doesn’t strictly need ground its specific geometry will only affect efficiency at reception
A quarter wave antenna needs a ground plane to reflect an image so you have a pseudo dipole but when it’s not present stuff still works out okay and you will get many local stations just fine.
Original 6v radio is happy with 5-8 volts and either polarity the radio is good on positive or negative ground because the front end is just a chopper for the power to the ac transformer and it won’t care much at all.
Let us know how it works out
-s

Thanks for the help (and confidence) I set it up the way I described got power and listened to some tunes it sounded great. Best of all the magic smoke is still inside!