Hello from Cuba

[Miguel Lopez]

I am led to believe the Astrad Auriga or Astrad Solar was called the Riga 103 which is a USSR model. The one you showed Miguel, must also be the same I imagine.

Astrad Solar is diferent from the one I showed. I found it at RMorg. But have to say that in the googling that I did to know the Astrad, the Solar appeared with the AURIGA marking too, so have to say that I'm confused. I do sustain that I have never seen any Astrad here in Cuba.

If it is OK I will ask you for some tips

I will be very happy to help as everybody has helped me in this community. I can share my experiences on Soviet radios repairing.

I discovered the middle ferrite aerial coil is disconnected.

If yours is the one I posted, that will be very easy. The layout in the schematic is very explanatory.

The power capacitors are a sort of grey colour

Don't worry about that. By the time they were building the VEF-206 family, they did not used the red-squared capacitors yet. Your set uses paper capacitors rated at 160V which never fail. In fact, the VEF-206 uses just one red-squared capacitor which is the cause of fault very often. You just remove it from the PCB and the set works fine.

the transistors "top hat" type

As said before, the problem with those transistors is broken legs due to rust. They are good transistor electronicallywise, but the legs break time after time. The RF transistors can be replaced by 1T308, and the AF transistors can be replaced by any general purpose silicon one, if you correct the bias point. The diode of the constant current source can be replaced by a 1N4148, althought I have never see this diode fail.

Sometimes you want to throw your Soviet radio through the window because of erratic behaviour, but being patient you learn to like them and restore them. Enjoy the trip to the Soviet-era-radio-land.