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Originally posted by crono33
my favourite radios are the pre-VHF era ones. when i was a kid i remember tuning on moskow radio on short waves, which broadcasted communist propaganda in italian. amazing stuff you could listen in those days
Me too. I was never much for the whole ham radio thing, although I did learn code... my dad made me is basically how I remember it, or at least I didn't want to disappoint him. There were all kinds of good old radios I could pull out of his junk pile and tinker with. Really quality stuff from the '40s that had been thrown away when television came along.
One set I remember well was a big old Zenith... vernier tuner with a dial as big as a dinner plate, big glass convex lens, with an electric motor to drive the tuning knob and a tuning eye tube in the front. In c. 1940 it had probably cost as much as a new car. I took it out of its enormous floor console and put the chassis on the table next to my bed. I loved putting on the headphones under the covers and listening all night to all the strange programs on the commerical broadcast bands, from the BBC, Radio Free Europe, Russian and Cuban propaganda, to the 50,000 watt blowtorches, the Grand Old Opry and the pirate rock & roll stations on the Texas-Mexico border. Damn, those were good radios. With a good antenna and decent atmospheric conditions you could pull down a signal from just about anywhere.
Looking at your radio with its voice-coil loudspeaker made me smile. I used some of those to construct my first home-built stereo. With 30 watts you could make the entire neighborhood's ears bleed. Rock on.
