let's see your vintage radios!

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ridgescan

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I'll start out with this one. I picked this one up at a garage sale in 1988 for $2-I never used it but I knew it was special. It has been packed away all these years and been through a couple moves with me. I did some spring cleaning Sunday and came across it. Shined it up and put 4 AAs in-boy it runs:)
This is the Zenith Royal 500 DeLuxe "Long Distance"
This is the first transistor radio Zenith ever made. Between this, the Royal 3000-1 TransOceanic, and the SX-88, I am truly a blessed man!
YouTube - ‪Vintage Radio-1959 Zenith Royal-500‬‏


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majoco

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The interesting thing about the Zenith 500's is that they had a tuned RF stage! Most of the other shirt-pocket jobbies were just straight into the mixer and that was it - local AM only.

Too many oldies to list - at the moment I'm restoring a Perdio PR110 Grosvenor - I had a new one when I was in the UK Merchant Navy in 1964-ish. Piece of cr@p really.

I have a T/O 3000-1 as well, goes well but not as well as my Nordmende Globetrotter - which has a separate HF tuner with RF stage and 11 shortwave bands! A Sony CRF 5090 sits in the cupboard and gets an airing occasionally. My favourite is still a 1970's JRC NRD515. But wait - there's more.....:roll:
 

majoco

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OK, Ridgy, here's a selection.....

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The Blaupunkt is a surprisingly good HF performer even on a short bit of wire - can't beat tubes!

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My favourite rig - was a POS when I bought it, but responded well to a cleanup and realignment. Ultra stable and sensitive. Came with a memory unit but some tosser left the batteries in it :roll: - took along time to get that going - even resorted to scrubbing the PC board in a bucket of hot soapy water - still a bit flakey.

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The Heathkit is nothing special, terrible audio and wanders all over the place. Nostalgia value only!
 
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ka3jjz

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Let's keep the scanners out, please - list only MW and HF radios - let's see the pix!

best regards..Mike
 

SCPD

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i have had many scanners in my life time my first one was a little blue 4 chanel cristal radio shack one then i went to a 50 chanel barecat210xl then i went to a barecat 200 chanel one then i went to a 1000 chanel radio shack then i went to a radio shack 1000 chanel dual trunking now i have a psr 300 1000 chanel triple trunking
 

ridgescan

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Ridge, You ARE a lucky man. Congrats on the cool toys.
thanks g5:) I appreciate that and I do appreciate these great old radios-they are like comfort to me! Martin, I guess we're the only ones here with vintage stock?? I know a couple other guys in here who have some SUPER vintage rigs but they're not crackin' for some reason:(
comeon guys let's see some:D
 

majoco

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...but wait, there's more....

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Haven't actually got my hands on this yet - only got it last night on our local auction website. It's got "Convair" on the front, but it's actually a VEF Spidola - made in Riga, Latvia about 1961. Weird schematic all in Russian may be a challenge if it doesn't work. LW and MW bands plus individual HF SW bands up to 13MHz in a turret tuner like the old TV's!

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My rack of most often used stuff, including a Kenwood R2000 that I bought new about 1982 and still goes well, despite my fiddling with some "mods" which usually got removed after finding they were no good. The only one that remains is the mod to enable the USB/LSB switching to properly tune the re-insertion oscillator. The things on top are a Yaesu preselector (don't call it an antenna tuner!), a kitset active antenna and a kitset 4-input audio mixer feeding a pair of computer speakers for great audio. A 24hour UTC homebrew clock and a Yaesu VR5000 wideband receiver at the top above the R2000. Above the NRD515 is a Kenwood TS120 transceiver running into a ham bands vertical and a Winradio G303 SDR (so called!). Hiding next to the speaker is a Uniden BCT8 scanner from a discone up on the roof. A couple of 12v power supplies keep most things going. Don't look around the back - it's like a bowl of spaghetti!

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Sitting in another rack is a Redifon R499A 6channel crystal controlled HF SSB receiver ex-Civil Aviation Authority that needs re-crystallising on the current HF aviation frequencies - very sensitive with a bomb-proof front end. Underneath a cassette deck modified with an audio driven motor switch to catch those elusive signals when I'm busy sleeping.....
 
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woody_46

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I just picked up a nice Hallicrafters S-108. Here is a picture of a used one, mine is almost mint. I haven't taken any pictures yet. Hallicrafters S-108

I just needed to replace the filter capacitors in it. A nice buy for 40$ with original bill of sale, etc.

I can tell you one thing we are spoiled by digital readout. This radio has great sensitivity, okay selectivity, but superb sound. It blows away solid state receivers in that category.
 

majoco

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Yep, that S-108 is a great receiver - what's more to the point, they look the part, don't they? A great big dial and lots of knobs to tweak to extract the very last bit of signal. A dial has far better "aesthetics" than a string of numbers, even if they do display down to the very last cycle! (Never confuse resolution with accuracy!)

When I was a kid in the UK, there was a USAF base nearby (Wethersfield) and we had lots of US families in the community in rented houses. They all had radios like this to listen to the US AFRTS (why was there always a ball game playing.....?) and I used to drool over the pages in their catalogues! All the old names have gone now though.
 
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