Reading Still Had Its Uses

After quite a while, the radio finally returned to normal and began playing the music on the tape.

"Sweet as honey, your smile is sweet as honey, like flowers blooming in the spring breeze..."

The singer was unknown, but his voice was pretty nice.

"That's the problem. It only does that when you first turn it on. After a while, it gets better. I don't know why..."

As he spoke, his uncle-in-law suddenly grew uneasy.

He had gone to several repair shops, hoping they could fix the thing.

But none of them dared take the job. If they broke it, they'd have to pay for it.

These old electronic devices were delicate. A few touches could snap one of the wires inside.

Besides, the radio's various components had long since gone out of production.

Even if a factory made them, they wouldn't fetch much of a price. The point of an antique was that it was old. Installing modern electronic components in an old device would be no different from slapping a patch on it.

Since it still worked, his uncle-in-law had no choice but to make do with it.

Zhang Yuan strode over to the radio, eager to give it a try. "Let me see if I can fix it!"

"Well... sigh."

"Go ahead and try."

His tone clearly showed that he didn't trust him.

His uncle-in-law was inwardly kicking himself. He felt he'd gotten carried away bragging.

His nephew might be amazing, studying "spaceship management" and even able to repair spaceships, but repairing a spaceship and repairing a radio were worlds apart!

Most importantly, there was no way he could make his nephew pay if he broke it!

When he saw Zhang Yuan's hands reach the radio, his heart clenched painfully.

But he couldn't say much without losing face, so he only shot his daughter a fierce look over his shoulder.

Ye Qingqing wasn't about to back down. She glared right back at her father, inwardly delighted. In her opinion, this old antique had long been discontinued, and its design blueprints had been lost ages ago. Who could possibly repair it?

Especially since... fixing a minor problem was actually much harder than fixing a major one.

Taking down her cousin, the "other people's kid," would let her vent some frustration. Maybe it would even prove that "studying was useless" and give her an excuse to study less in the future...

By then, Zhang Yuan had unscrewed the radio's casing, exposing its electronic components: the switch, power supply, variable capacitor, potentiometer, ferrite rod, and so on. It wasn't too complicated.

It was precisely because these components weren't complicated that they had stood the test of time and survived to this day.

The more complex and delicate something was, the more easily it broke. Few Huawei or Apple smartphones from the 21st century had survived, and any that had could fetch an astronomical price.

Zhang Yuan had never repaired an old antique like this before. It was a brand-new challenge.

In the past, he might have avoided it, but now, he felt a strange urge to explore and give it a try.

He took a deep breath, and his mind began working at full speed.

He tried to use what he had learned to figure out how the radio worked.

All electronic devices dealt with electrons and magnetic fields; their basic principles were much the same. A radio simply converted audio signals through various circuits.

"This radio just played music from a tape, so the antenna, variable capacitor, and detector circuit weren't really involved. The noise at the start probably wasn't caused by any of those parts..."

"Could the tape be the problem?"

Zhang Yuan took out the tape, reset it by hand, and put it back in.

"Sweet as honey, your smile is sweet as honey..."

This time, it played from the beginning without any noise.

Zhang Yuan switched to another tape and pressed the play button.

"I could love you forever and ever..."

Still no noise.

"So it's probably not the tape."

His uncle-in-law watched him try one thing after another, growing more and more anxious. He hurriedly said, "It only makes that racket when you first turn it on. After that, it's fine. If you can't fix it... just forget it..."

His heart stayed clenched the whole time. He could only hope his nephew would realize the difficulty and back off.

Don't break it.

Please, don't break it!

"It only does that at the beginning?" Zhang Yuan waited a while, then placed the radio beneath the air conditioner and let it blow for ten minutes.

He plugged it back in. Sure enough, once the radio had cooled down, it started blaring again.

"Bzzzz—buzz!"

The shrill noise made his liver ache.

It took quite a while before it finally quieted down.

Zhang Yuan pondered.

The process of checking for errors was a little like debugging a computer program. Now that he'd confirmed when the bug appeared, all he had to do was find the cause and fix it.

Zhang Yuan paced back and forth across the room, quickly thinking through the possible culprits.

A loose connection?

No, a loose connection wouldn't make it blare at the start. It would just stop working intermittently.

"It's not a microphone-feedback issue, either."

After turning it over in his mind, he figured it was probably a warm-up problem.

This old-fashioned radio used vacuum tube technology.

Inside the nearly airtight vacuum chamber were two main components: one was called the heater, located in the center of the tube, and it glowed while operating; the other consisted of a cathode, a metal grid, and a metal plate.

"If the vacuum tubes in the circuit don't warm up properly, the voltage throughout the circuit will become unstable. Some of that irregular voltage will get passed on to the amplifier circuit, making the tape player blare when there's no signal."

"Then, once the radio-frequency circuit has warmed up and the vacuum tube voltage has stabilized, everything returns to normal and the tape player works properly."

Zhang Yuan clapped his hands. That had to be it!

His uncle-in-law watched him pace back and forth while casually eating fruit. It was putting him in a terrible mood. What kind of repairman walked around while working?

Ye Qingqing pressed her lips together to hide her smile.

Zhang Yuan lowered his head and narrowed his eyes as he began removing the vacuum tubes one by one.

He was really taking it apart!

I...

His uncle-in-law nearly cried. He shuddered and said, "Zhang Yuan, if you can't fix it, let's take it to a professional antique repair shop! I know a really skilled repairman... though he charges a bit much."

Zhang Yuan acted as if he hadn't heard him, completely absorbed in his work. He genuinely hadn't heard what his uncle-in-law was saying.

He rearranged the vacuum tubes, screwed each one back into place, and waited for the radio to cool down.

His uncle-in-law's face flushed red. He couldn't help wondering to himself, Did he break it? Are there any parts left over?

Even his aunt couldn't stand watching anymore. "Look how nervous you are. It's just a radio. What's the big deal?"

"What do you know? Even if it's just a radio, do you know its history? It's very..."

Zhang Yuan didn't answer. He simply pressed the play button.

Click—

The radio warmed up obediently, like a gentle lamb, and made no more noise.

"Sweet as honey, your smile is sweet as honey..."

The lovely song echoed through the air.