That radio dates from the mid-1980s. If your buddy had a 1985 Ford Tempo that won't start, there's a good chance it would need more than just one little thing to make it a daily driver again. 40 years takes its toll, even if the mileage is low.
Some time around the 40-year mark, you can count on electrolytic caps in that sort of radio to start failing from age alone. A high-mileage radio will have more than one of them gone bad by now.
This sounds too much like radios I would see that were "thrown in" with a trade deal of some sort. Usually because someone up the sequence of owners found out how much the radio really needed and chose not to spend the money. Naturally, this detail gets left out before the next owner takes posession.
The quality control at RCI in the 1980s was not so good. Expect at least one of the front-panel controls to be bad. Don't know why those radios would have that fault so often, but it's worth checking if you can. But if someone shows me a radio that old that won't receive, my next question is how many attempts have been made to fix it since it first broke down? For every pair of hands that didn't get it to work, expect one, two or more new faults to have been added to the original one. A guy who tries and fails to make it work often leaves a trail of one or more new faults inside the radio.
Might just be a bad speaker. Has anyone tried an external speaker? For that matter did they try to key it?
I have mostly sworn off of fixing pre-1990 Galaxy radios. Ended up with too many of them that weren't even worth the owner's time to come back and claim. Ran out of room for parts radios and unloaded them on fleabay until someone took notice and started ratting the "prohibited" status to fleabay. That results in a nastygram from them after they cancel the listing.
Must be somebody out there with RCI experience and a sense of adventure, right?
One last thought. Has anyone looked inside to check for missing parts? If it's been used as an organ donor, that's worth knowing.
73
