Soldering¶
The Tivoli Audio Portable that I got five years ago, was and is the best radio I’ve ever gotten. Especially for the portable ones.
It has in build in battery pack that re-charges every time you put it into a power socket. Once fully charged, it will play for hours.
The audio quality is astonishing for the size of this little box. And it gets all the local radio stations.
There’s jack input and a jack output as well.
Since it’s already five years old, it does not have additional WiFi or Bluetooth modules.
After all this years the first thing that gave up were the batteries. Not surprising at all, I must add. Going through so many re-charging cycles, it’s just a question of time until the capacity got depleted.
Tivoli was so kind to make the battery pack easy accessible through the back-side. The battery pack consist of six AA-Batteries, bundled together and using an adapter to connect to the radio.
Getting out the soldering iron, this got easily fixed:
Solder out the adapter from the batteries
Use some tape to tie together a new battery pack.
Solder the connectors and the adapter back in place.
Wrap everything up.
For the Batteries I went for the well-known Eneloope. Those do not only come pre-charged, the also last “forever” and due to previous experience the are more reliable than any other brand I’ve used so far. And I’ve tried a couple of different brands through the years.
Everything put back together and strapped back into the back-lid of the radio, it worked in an instant.
Unfortunately I have checked the price for a new battery pack after I’ve done this little stunt. Even more unfortunately: the price is quite reasonable. But it’s not as cheap as doing it your self. And the extra bonus: By choosing the batteries, I could increase the mAH from 1700 from Tivoli to 1900mAH by just a quarter of the price. If I had invested a bit more money, the battery could have gone up to 2700mAH and last even longer.
I will keep this in mind for the next change.
Update: The runtime of the radio has significantly increased from ~10min to about two weeks of daily usage.