This Recreated Vintage RCA 118 Tombstone Radio Uses a Teensy to Play Classic Broadcasts

Before television came along—and well into its existence—radio dominated the home entertainment industry. Families would gather around their radio to listen to the news, serialized radio dramas, and, of course, music. Because the radio was so important, most were designed to be as beautiful as the furniture that surrounded them. They were also built to last, which means you can easily find functioning antique radios. Mike Mitchell recreated one such vintage radio and used a Teensy to play classic radio broadcasts through it.

This radio started its life as an RCA 118 “Tombstone” short wave and broadcast radio from 1934. The radio was in rough shape when Mitchell found it, so he abandoned the idea of restoring it. Instead, he decided to turn it into a completely custom MP3 player. That started with rebuilding the cabinet, which was handled mostly by Mitchell’s friend Mark. Mark cut down the chassis to reduce its size, relocated the controls, and built an entirely new cabinet. All of the electronic work was done by Mitchell himself.

Mitchel retained the original tuning knobs, and connected them to a Teensy 3.6 microcontroller development board. The Teensy measures the capacitance of the tuner, and any time it changes a random new “radio station” is played. Those radio stations are actually MP3 files containing classic radio broadcasts (those can be downloaded from sources like the Internet Archive). A small 20 watt class D amplifier is used to push the audio out through a pair of full-range speakers. Mitchell even added a hissing sound effect between stations to really sell the experience. If you love the look of antique radios, but want to do something more fun than listen to static-filled shortwave frequencies, this is a great project to take inspiration from.