After 50 years of service, my radio needed repairs because time had taken its toll on its capacitors. Time had also taken a toll on radio stations and I was especially disappointed that some of the AM stations I enjoyed earlier (like 1050 CHUM and 1150 CKOC) are now TSN stations. However, I had found enough music-playing AM stations (ones that hadn't switched to talk or sports format) that I could still have some audio entertainment. My wife and kids weren't fans of the AM stations now on my presets and they convinced me to go for the FM tuner upgrade.
After getting my radio back from the radio shop, I took the covers off and took some photos of the new parts. The FMC-1 board is very small but, even so, it wasn't easily to find a place to mount it in the Chryco AM radio of my 1965 Barracuda
The Aurora FMC-1 includes a auxiliary input feature and the radio shop installed a pair of female RCA jacks. Since my radio has only one output for the dashboard speaker, the stereo output from my MP3 player is combined into mono sound. I bought a 6' cable with a 3.5mm male audio plug on one end and a pair of male RCA plugs on the other. I made sure that the 3.5mm plug would fit in my phone case's headphone jack hole because many jacks appear to be quite large.
I leave the RCA side of the cable attached to my radio and the other end rests on my transmission hump until I need it. The headphone cable functions as the FM antenna for many MP3 players (including my phone) and, with a relatively strong FM signal, I can use the MP3 player's FM tuner instead of the FMC-1 FM tuner even inside the car. Using the car's external antenna, the FMC-1 is a better FM tuner than my phone. It is a wonder that the phone's tuner works at all because of the Faraday Cage effect of the car's body.
If I wanted to return my radio to OEM condition, the Aurora FMC-1 FM tuner upgrade is easily removable.
