Realistic TRC-1001 owners - what brand of NiMH cells fit ?

[bigbloke]

Hi Guys

On behalf of a friend's missus, I have acquired for a "big number" birthday a Realistic TRC-1001 Handheld.

Its turned up this morning. its a minter! - version 1 hardware with all the little bung plugs still attached and the
telescopic antenna still in one piece. RX needs a bit of a tune up but tested over 7 miles this morning. he does a lot of
4 x 4 / green lane driving.

However, the battery bay is designed for traditional dry cells / AA Nicads which were 13.7mm or less in diameter.
(yes I know about the dummy cells as well)

Modern NiMH cells are around 14.1 to 14.3mm diameter - and whilst I could get them into the battery bay , if I do -
they arent ever coming back out!

So what brand and capacity do you have in yours please ? or what did you do to ream out the battery bay to around
14.4mm please ?

Many thanks

regards

BB

[lambrettadave]

I noticed this sometime ago and I ended up buying nicads from b&m.

PS the old 1001 can be dated from inside the battery compartment.
I have a few of these and just acquired a boxed one from knights

[bigbloke]

Thanks Dave - I have a B&M a few hills away so will drop in after work
the MKII 1001 I believe had a master power trimmer by the PA heatsink which is how I
remeber the difference.

glad the antenna on this one wasnt broken or I would have had to get a mate to make up an
antenna base extension on his lathe and then bypass L13 on the board to make it into a centre loaded
antenna - which would probably work better than the original , but for mate birthday I wanted to keep it as factory as possible !

Regards

BB

[lambrettadave]

There's one thing that I do know is that these are massive compared with today's set's.
I nearly had a 100 5 as my first set as soon as I was it' I could see the potential of it being a handheld / mobile or even used in the house but unfortunately the deal fell through so my first realistic was the 1010 cept set which I did use a lot in fact every time I went anyway it was with me. I still got it today.

Good luck with the batteries

If you do struggle with batteries, try contacting Knights to see what they offer

[GrahamG]

Hi BB - joined up to answer this (three months late) as I have just been through the same search process myself. No doubt you have solved it by now but this is for anyone else with the same problem. I find that GP 'Recyko' 1300mAH AA NiMH batteries fit easily into mine, the mAH rating is important though because batteries with higher mAH ratings, even the same brand and battery 'model', tend to be too 'thick' to fit down inside the battery tubes - as you have obviously found.

This is one place where you can, at the time of my writing this (July 2026) find the 1300mAH GP 'Recyko' batteries in the UK:-

https://cpc.farnell.com/gp-batteries/gp ... dp/BT07132

No doubt you can find them in other places as well.

I've also tried Japanese made 1900mAH 'LADDA' batteries from IKEA in mine but they are a very close fit and only some individual batteries will slide into the middle battery tube of three - the middle tube must have a microscopically smaller diameter. You can't guarantee that you will get enough 'narrow' enough batteries in a random batch so I can't recommend this brand or type for use in the TRC-1001.

It's important for the batteries to be able to slide freely in the tubes so that the spring pressing on one end of a column of batteries can press the whole column against the stud at the other end of the column. If the batteries are a stiff fit this can't happen and if the batteries get stuck while slightly separated in the tube, there will be no continuous circuit and the radio will seem dead.

[GrahamG]

While on the subject of TRC-1001 handhelds and batteries, a couple of other things worth knowing. BB already knows these were supplied with two strange looking 'dummy' batteries which are battery shaped objects with a connection straight through from their positive stud to their flat negative end.

If you are using 1.5V Alkaline or Zinc-Carbon batteries (all of which still fit these radios perfectly in my experience, even ones bought this day) you are supposed to fit only eight, plus the two dummy batteries. That brings the voltage to (8 x 1.5V) = 12v. It's not a good idea to fit 10 x 1.5V dry batteries (giving a supply voltage of 15V) because that is perilously close to the maximum voltage rating of some of the components used in the radio.

If you are using 1.2V Nicad or NiMH rechargeable batteries, you set the dummy batteries to one side and fit ten rechargeable batteries for a voltage of (10 x 1.2V) = 12V.

There are two jacks on the side of the radio, one marked 'PWR' for external 12V power, centre positive, the other marked 'CHG' for 'charging'. The DC plugs to be plugged into these need to have the correct 2.1mm (not 2.5mm) hollow in the tip otherwise they will not operate the switch in the socket correctly. The switch in the PWR socket disconnects the batteries from the radio and the incoming external 12V supply - if an incorrect plug is used the incoming supply will be connected to the radio but won't be disconnected from the batteries, so the external supply with its effectively unlimited current will try to charge the batteries - which would be especially messy if the batteries fitted were DRY batteries rather than rechargeables.

The CHG socket is also centre positive and is unfortunately the same size as the PWR socket so it's not difficult to plug the wrong plug into the wrong socket. Any voltage applied to the CHG socket gets connected directly to the batteries so the charger MUST include some kind of current limiting, it can't just be direct voltage, unlimited current from a power supply. The other thing about charging is that in order to push charge into a 12V battery stack, ie, to make current flow into it, the output voltage from the charger has to be significantly higher than 12V.

The original charger (which I have) outputs 18V DC, but is current limited by a low value high wattage resistor in series with the positive lead inside the charger. The output current from it is a mere 50mA which was fine for overnight charging of what were typically 600mAH Nicads back in the day but would take ages to charge modern higher capacity cells, so my recommendation is to forget about in-radio charging and just charge your NiMH batteries in a modern external 'smart' charger which will shut off automatically when the batteries are charged.