A bit of radio history

A bit of radio history

In the 1990s I bought an old table radio at an auction in Saskatchewan. Inside the cabinet was a licence from 1950, shown below.

For the sake of privacy I have blotted out the name of the licencee, just in case some members or friends of his family are still living.

Even home radio receivers had to be licenced back then. I wonder if receiving licences were ever required in the U.S. There's no such requirement in Canada today, but I'm not sure when the law was repealed.

The conditions on the reverse of the licence included non-disclosure of communications that have been intercepted accidentally or without authorization.

The radio was still in working condition, and so was a Westinghouse console radio from 1929 that I had acquired at another auction, but I had to give away my vintage radios when I moved to BC.

Great find! $2 to listen to the radio for 12 months back in 1950 sounds expensive. I wonder what that equates to these days?

SDRPlayer said:

Great find! $2 to listen to the radio for 12 months back in 1950 sounds expensive. I wonder what that equates to these days?

Click to expand...

The set only covered MW, by the way. I don't know what $2 would amount to today, but I'm glad listening to AM radio no longer requires a licence, because the content I find there isn't worth listening to. I'm currently paying $70 to use the internet for a single month. but at least there's far more content.

There couldn't have been many local AM stations to listen to in rural Saskatchewan back then, but I'll bet there were lots of AM DXers. The terrain in Wilcox, SK is flat as a pancake, which makes for great reception.

SDRPlayer said:

Great find! $2 to listen to the radio for 12 months back in 1950 sounds expensive. I wonder what that equates to these days?

Click to expand...

About $21.

Thanks ridge, i'm guessing the fee was just a tax, no other purpose?

ridgescan said:

About $21.

Click to expand...

So how much is satellite radio(XM, Sirius) for a year, nowdays?

Jim

SDRPlayer said:

Thanks ridge, i'm guessing the fee was just a tax, no other purpose?

Click to expand...

The thing states "license fee"

GB46 that's a neat find. I love stuff like that.

a29zuk said:

So how much is satellite radio(XM, Sirius) for a year, nowdays?

Jim

Click to expand...

Not sure about the question. I do know my Lexus RX350 has that capability but I know I wouldn't pay the crazy price they wanted for Sirius. Forgot though how much.

There are several Euro countries where such licenses are required to be able to listen to anything but CB, ham, TV, AM, FM...if memory serves, the UK is one. Surprised to see Sask here; is that still the case in that province? Mike

"You can be fined up to £1,000 if you watch or record live TV without a TV Licence"
You need a license to watch TV in the UK.
https://www.gov.uk/tv-licence

GB46 said:

There couldn't have been many local AM stations to listen to in rural Saskatchewan back then

Click to expand...

I remember driving to northern Wisconsin from Chicago in the 70's and I could only pick up 1 FM station once in WI.

scanmanmi said:

"You can be fined up to £1,000 if you watch or record live TV without a TV Licence"
You need a license to watch TV in the UK.
https://www.gov.uk/tv-licence

Click to expand...

The cost of a TV license is now £150.50 per year ($190 USD) for color TV. It has really gone up over the years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom

ka3jjz said:

There are several Euro countries where such licenses are required to be able to listen to anything but CB, ham, TV, AM, FM...if memory serves, the UK is one. Surprised to see Sask here; is that still the case in that province? Mike

Click to expand...

No, that was repealed many years ago, but I don't know exactly when. Actually, the law was a federal one, and so was the government agency involved, so it probably affected the other provinces, too.

The only enforcement of radio regulations I can recall seeing was when the Dept. of Communications rode around with direction finding antennas on their cars, and I believe that was to monitor illegal activity on the citizens band -- e.g. high power, etc. At one time CBers had to be licenced and had callsigns, but that's no longer the case.

SDRPlayer said:

Thanks ridge, i'm guessing the fee was just a tax, no other purpose?

Click to expand...

That was probably the case, just like the CB licences our Dept. of Communications used to issue. No test was required; there were regulations, of course, which most CBers ignored, but very few of them got into serious trouble.

The DOC has a rather confusing history, by the way. Initially, Canada's radio regulations came under the jurisdiction of our Dept. of Transport. The DOC emerged later on, eventually changing its name to Communications Canada, but the radio spectrum is now managed by Industry Canada. So the DOC no longer exists. I'm not sure of any of the exact dates, but I do remember the DOC was still around during the 1970s.

Back in the 60's in the UK if you had a radio installed in your car, you needed a separate licence for that, I think it was £5. That's why many transistor portables had all the controls on the top and a Motorola type connector on the bottom - you could buy a mounting rack to put in the car and slide the radio in and out. No tax payable, it's portable, not fixed, Officer....
My Nordmende is a good example.....

majoco said:

Back in the 60's in the UK if you had a radio installed in your car, you needed a separate licence for that, I think it was £5. That's why many transistor portables had all the controls on the top and a Motorola type connector on the bottom - you could buy a mounting rack to put in the car and slide the radio in and out. No tax payable, it's portable, not fixed, Officer....
My Nordmende is a good example.....

Click to expand...

In 1967 I visited Germany on a university exchange program. I had always wanted one of those Nordmende radios, and assumed because of the exchange rate that I could afford to buy one while in Germany. I was staying near Hamburg, so I visited a big department store (Karstadt) in the city and was disappointed to learn that I still couldn't afford a radio like that.

Three years later I was in London without any kind of radio, so I bought a little portable in kit form (no soldering required), assembled it and sat in one of the parks. There was a sign in the park restricting the use of radios, presumably because of a noise bylaw, but I got around that by listening with earphones. I learned later on that radio receivers required licencing, and here I had been out in public listening to an unlicenced radio. Well, no one said anything. Besides, I was only a tourist, so what did I know?

You'll be hacked off to know that I bought the Nordmende on EPay from a guy in Switzerland for US$40! Fortunately our company had a DHL account so the delivery was hidden in a lot of other stuff! The radio had been standing on a very damp surface for a while so was in a poor state but it goes well now. 11 shortwave bands!

majoco said:

You'll be hacked off to know that I bought the Nordmende on EPay from a guy in Switzerland for US$40! Fortunately our company had a DHL account so the delivery was hidden in a lot of other stuff! The radio had been standing on a very damp surface for a while so was in a poor state but it goes well now. 11 shortwave bands!

Click to expand...

How old is the radio? I haven't seen that brand around lately, but then I eventually stopped wishing for a Nordmende after acquiring my first good shortwave receiver. The thing I admired most about Nordmende, and Telefunken and Grundig as well, was the beautiful cabinetry in their table models. It seemed back then that a German radio could always be identified by the rounded corners and glossy finish on its wooden cabinet.

I took an industrial arts course in Grade 9 (in 1960). It gave me access to lots of professional power tools, so I tried to create a cabinet like that for an old radio I owned. The original cabinet was missing; all I had was the chassis. The finished cabinet won me an award certificate at an exhibit of student projects put on by the Ford Foundation, but ironically, I never got to put the chassis into the cabinet, because I had already junked the radio before my project was finished, so the cabinet had to be exhibited without a radio. What a stupid kid! :lol:

PS: The cabinet of my Sangean ATS-909X has rounded corners, too, but then, it's molded out of plastic -- that's cheating!

GB46 said:

There couldn't have been many local AM stations to listen to in rural Saskatchewan back then, but I'll bet there were lots of AM DXers. The terrain in Wilcox, SK is flat as a pancake, which makes for great reception.

Click to expand...

I tried to upload the 1950 White's Radio Log here but the file was too big. I was not able to reduce the size, either.

So check out this website:
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Radio_Log_Master_Page.htm


P.S. In the 1950 issue, if you scroll down to the listings by frequency, the first station is 540 CBK Watrous, Sask....50,000 watts!

Jim

a29zuk said:

I tried to upload the 1950 White's Radio Log here but the file was too big. I was not able to reduce the size, either.

So check out this website:
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Radio_Log_Master_Page.htm


P.S. In the 1950 issue, if you scroll down to the listings by frequency, the first station is 540 CBK Watrous, Sask....50,000 watts!

Jim

Click to expand...

Interesting! I lived in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan from 1996 to 2002, and the only AM station in that city was CHAB on 800 kHz running 10,000 watts. Today it's still Moose Jaw's only AM station. I see from the Summer 1950 issue (to correspond with the issue date of that old radio licence) that the station was already there, and running 5,000 watts. There were also two stations in Regina. In addition, there was CBC's 50,000-watt transmitter in Watrous, SK. Those four stations would have been the easiest to pick up in Wilcox, SK.

It should be pointed out that there were relatively few major cities in SK, and that still holds true today. Most of the province consists of small farming towns and villages. Some of them had no connection with a power grid back then, so there were a lot of battery radios and probably some local generators in use. Judging from an old radio I used to have, AC farm power, if it was available, was 25 rather than 60 hz. Look at the geographic size of the province on a map, and then consider that even today only slightly over one million people live there! For radio enthusiasts there wouldn't be much chance of a high noise floor outside of the major cities!