Nice chunky portable turned up for repair. Hacker Sovereign 2. Mains and battery, LW, MW and VHF-FM. wow! Mr. Hacker was an engineer with Roberts Radio, making lovely radios. Mr. Hacker decided to leave and set up his own manufacturing company and after many hours of careful consideration, named it…Hacker.
It won’t surprise you to see that the design of Hacker radios are very similar to Roberts and in my opinion, they have the edge. The set was dead due to a faulty on-off switch within the volume control. No way would I be able to find a replacement to fit, so a separate power toggle switch was fitted at the rear. Now we had power, the set was very knock sensitive. There are several PCBs linked together with small plugs and connectors and most of these tend of oxidize of the years. The other issue is that the resistors used are film metal ended ones. The end crimps suffer with intermittent contact, resulting in a host of faults. If you really want to do a first class job, these should be replaced, But, the cost is high, time consuming, fiddly. Even worse if the set has been stored in a damp environment. The other thing is that the FM tuner heart only goes up to 101 MHz, limiting you to listening to grown up radio stations. A bit of tweaking up and she worked really well. Big loudspeaker driven by a germanium push pull transistor stage, delivering several kilowatts of power. Bass and treble controls.
Nice to know that will still be working when all the modern flat screen tv S laptops and cats have fo be scrapped through obsolescence !
Nearly right hacker was a competitor of Roberts
Ron and Arthur hacker founded a company called dynatron in the 1920s in Maidenhead and this company built a good reputation for quality and sound then the company was sold to Philips in the 1950s I think they disagreed with the changes Philips wanted to make so they founded hacker in 1959 and went on to make the sovereign herald hunter autocrat Democrat and the super sovereign.
The company hit on hard times in the 1970s as the brothers refused to compromise on quality and the company went bankrupt in 1976 I think and was bought out by a company motoradio who moved production to Bournemouth from Maidenhead and then brought out the consort herald and Windsor and went out of business totally after a fire gutted the factory in 1981
The only connection to Roberts was they acquired the name in 1981 I think
Also that is a hacker sovereign 3 it’s from about 1972 to 1975/6 I think. They were a lovely looking radio with the aluminium top and extruded grille
Mine is a sovereign 2 a rp25a it has a different form factor with a foam padded case in blue black or rarely white it is smaller than the sovereign 3 but has a equally great sound
I have a hacker hunter which looks similar to the sovereign 3 it’s from 1976