INTRODUCTION

On December 28th I made a trip to Kentucky to pick up two old radio broadcast consoles. The markings on the front said Autogram, and a tag on the back stated the model number was 10-10, and the serial numbers were 438 and 474. Each were 10 input, stereo broadcast consoles. The first task was to identify them.

Autogram began life in Sherman Texas. It was owned by Ernie and DeLores Ankele who manufactured "high-tech" relay logic automation systems under the name Day Manufacturing. Later it evolved to Autogram for the console side.

John Hearle, (Broadcast Group Manager at Collins Radio), approached Autogram with the idea of designing a new console line for Collins. Collins, in the late 60s, was in competition for the maket which also had McMartin, Gates, RCA, and others actively selling products.

In 1973 Collins sold to Rockwell, and all the technical data was "borrowed", and manufacturing taken away from Autogram to an unknown manufacture that cloned the consoles. The manufacturer ultimately went belly up, and console manufacturing was moved back to Rockwell until it's demise. (It seems there is manufacuring karma.) Autogram eventually sold to CRL/Orban in July of 2006.

This means there were variations of this console, built by three different people. It appears I have the original versions before the change. The consoles may have originally come from Cleveland OH as there was a business card from a station inside one, and one of the consoles remote inputs was titled "CAVS".

The inputs preamps are on cans with octal sockets, MT-1, MPA-1 (note the Collins reference on the lable), and others.

GETTING TO WORK

The first thing needed was to clean the board of dirt and nicotine. The amount of "brown" taken off the console was considerable, and it was obvious I would need some better cleaner than the stock 409 liquid out of the spray bottle.

The picture to the right is the cleaning on the inside where the power supply was located. I removed the power supply in order to replace dried up capacitors, and scrub it down. The paper towel shows what was taken out of that area.

Note the uncleaned area around the hole that is for the power connector.

Jim Gillen, at WLIO television, tipped me off to a great cleaner that took off the nicotine, cart lables, scotch tape, and dirt. The product is called "TSP". It has to be mixed with water, and we used an old toothbrush to scrub the surfaces. It really took the majority of the crud off. Some caution must be observed as it is acidic.

Film of nicotine on inside of cabinet.	Dirt and nicotine on end of cabinet.

Another cleaning effort needed to be made on the connections. When the wired were disconnected, they were just cut and were still hanging on the terminal block

When removed, all the wiring to the console was cut and left on the terminal blocks, so it was removed and the terminal area cleaned. The same applied to the right side of the console where all the outputs and logic are located. While cleaning this area up a few kludges were

RESOURCES

• Manual for Autogram/CRL IC-10
• Manual for Collins IC-6A and IC10A
• Manual for Collins IC-6A and IC10A (New Copy)