A walnut wireless on the workbench in the evening, the lamp on, the service sheet and the meter beside it.

A radio repair shop in 1952

Sets come in over the counter with their owners' tickets, and you find what's wrong by ear, with a meter on the real circuit and the service sheet, then put them right part by part at your bench before shutting up shop and going up to bed.

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The underside of a valve set's chassis: valve sockets, tag strips, resistors and capacitors, the wiring in its period colours.

A real circuit on the bench

Every set is a working valve superhet, and the game solves its circuit as you work on it, so the meter reads what the circuit really does and what you hear comes from the same sums. A drying capacitor makes it hum, a dead valve stays cold, a dry joint crackles when you tap the chassis, and a reservoir capacitor gone short blows the fuse, and the new one too if you fit it before you've found the short.

The chassis out of its cabinet on the bench, the bench speaker plugged in, the soldering iron in its stand.

All done by hand

There are no buttons for the work. You loosen the knobs, turn the set round and take its back off, slide the chassis out and plug the bench speaker in, then drag the meter's probes onto the pins and tags, listen down the line with the signal tracer, pull valves, free joints with the soldering iron and fit new parts from the parts cabinet.

The shop by day: the counter, the shop door, and two mended sets for sale in the bay window onto the High Street.

Running the shop

The morning paper comes through the letterbox with small ads from people whose sets have gone wrong, and the ones you circle bring them in. You take the money in pounds and pence when they collect, and spares come from the wholesaler's trade list, posted one day and on the mat the next morning. The shop keeps proper hours with half-day closing on a Wednesday, and when the clock gets round to ten you climb the ladder to the loft and sleep until seven.

Home under the loft of an evening: the armchair, the wall lamp lit, a mended wireless on the cupboard, the bench beyond.

A set of your own

Order a spoilt set off the trade list, sold as seen, and mend it at the bench like any other. Then take it home to the cupboard by your armchair and tune it in of an evening, or put it in the bay window with a price on its ticket and see whether someone off the street comes in for it.

The Wireless Repair Handbook

The book that lies on the bench in the game, all of it, from safety and the tools to finding the fault. It only teaches what the game does.

Download the handbook

A PDF, 45 pages, 10 MB. What's in it.