Stuffage (noun): materials and items related to a specific general topic.
Radio Shack (RadioShack, The Shack, You have questions, we have cell phones et al) is basically gone these days. Yeah, they still have an online presence, and some dealers still have some Radio Shack signs and products but the place we grew up with is dead and buried.
Many of us old-timers remember fondly walking or riding our bikes to the local Radio Shack (It was two words back then) to look at the latest scanners, CB’s and (later in our lives) stereos for our bedrooms, cars and dorms. They weren’t the best by far, but they were affordable and, more importantly, every town over 35 people had at least one Radio Shack store or dealer.
Store or Dealer? Well, if you were in a small town, you may have had had a “Radio Shack Dealer” rather than a dedicated Radio Shack Store. “Dealers” were independent businesses, mostly hardware stores, dime stores or appliance shops, that sold Radio Shack products. They would not have the entire line, only what they thought would sell in their market. “Stores” were company owned and sold the entire line. When I was a kid we spent a lot of time at a relative’s farm in central Illinois, there was a Radio Shack Dealer in a hardware store in the next town over that we would ride our bikes or horses to along an old railroad right-of-way that had been abandoned. It was right next to an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, complete with a soda fountain that even in the 60’s looked nostalgic.
While we have often talked about our favorite and least favorite Radio Shack scanners, they always seemed to have the accessories we needed. Need an antenna for the car, got it. Need a power cable for that old scanner, got that too. Need batteries for your cattle prod to herd your cats? Yep, got those as well. This is the kind of thing that we in the Midwest called “Stuffage”. It’s not the glittery products that adorn the cover of the catalog or front of the store but the nitty-gritty product at the back of the store that we kids could afford to buy with our allowance and lawn-mowing money.
Radio Shack had a few quirks that made it unique. For us, the “Battery of the Month” card was awesome. I had a few stores in bicycle range, so I had cards for each store. I also would watch for a different employee to be working so I could use an additional card. This way I could get up to a dozen batteries each month when the stars aligned, and my mom would drive me to the mall (which had 2 Radio Shack’s in it!).
Another quirk that became important to me when I got older was that Radio Shack was one of the last stores that allowed smoking inside of it. They even had free-standing ashtrays shaped like an EnerCell battery.
Every time you bought anything at Radio Shack, they would fill out a 2-part receipt and get your name and address on it, they would keep the white (top) copy and give you the yellow (carbon) copy. They had signs posted that advised “Why we ask for your name and address”, it was for their mailing lists so they could send you the catalog. I would often give the name of my dog with my neighbor’s address just to mess with the guy. My neighbor would get confused however when catalogs would show up in their mail addressed to my dog and not theirs.
There were several Radio Shack products that we would buy over and over. One was the famous 20-176 scanner antenna. This was a basic VHF quarter-wave ground-plane that had a couple of UHF spikes. It was a great antenna for $9.95 (in the 70’s) and retained its value when it went up to $14.95 and later $19.95 by the time Radio Shack bit the dust. It worked great for all scanner bands except low-band and worked well as a dual-band ham radio antenna (2-meter and 440) while maintaining a low profile. I bought many of these over the years and would usually put up 2 when I could sneak onto the roof of my condo or apartment. I have one still in the attic of my home now and it works fine.
Of course, Radio Shack had other scanner antennas, they even owned the company that made them, sort of. AntennaCraft, of Burlington Iowa, made most of the base station TV and Scanner antennas for Radio Shack and also sold them under their own brand. I have 4 of these and could sell them for a whole lot more than the $5 each I paid when they were closed out years ago. Sometimes Radio Shack would have the AntennaCraft branded antennas in the stores, I presume this was an error in shipping.
AntennaCraft was owned by the same holding company as Radio Shack, as were several other manufacturers over the decades. While their primary business was TV antennas and related accessories their scanner antennas were well regarded.
The “ST-x” series were well known and in particular the ST-2 is revered in the scanner hobby. These were sold by several retailers like Grove Enterprises and Scanner Master but were identical to the ones sold by and as Radio Shack.
They made the ST-1, an off-center fed vertical dipole, the revered ST-2, a center-fed dipole with multiple elements, the ST-3, which we all know as the famous 20-176 mentioned above and the ST-4, a discone. Radio Shack sold each of these at one time or another but did not use names or model numbers, just the catalog number.
As for the ST-2 there have been a couple attempts at recreating it. One RadioReference member went so far as to actually make a replica based on the original design but with better materials. That project seems to have gone away but it did show some real promise. I tried to convince Scanner Master to have one built but after a cost analysis it was determined that the potential sales would not be enough to pay for the tooling and design costs. ChannelMaster also made an almost identical antenna called the “Monitenna”, Model 5094A.
One could also buy mobile scanner antennas at Radio Shack. They sold a couple different mag-mount scanner antennas over the years. While I was more into NMO and trunk-lip mounts for my vehicles I did have a few of these and they worked just fine. My favorite was the one with 2 covered loading coils, it worked quite well on all bands, even low-band.
Radio Shack had all kinds of coax as well. They sold RG-58, RG-59 and RG-8 in precut 25-, 50- and 100-foot lengths with PL259’s. They even had bulk coax in some stores so you could buy the length you needed. Radio Shack owned the manufacturer of their coax as well. They had all kinds of connectors and adapters.
Need a tri-pod mount for the roof? How about a 5-foot mast? Twin-Lead? Radio Shack had all this stuff. While most of it was geared towards TV antennas, much of it worked just fine on scanner antennas. Remember that the various scanner and TV bands are intertwined, the big difference is that TV is horizontally polarized while two-way radio is mostly vertical. Take a TV antenna and flip it on its side and you have a great (albeit very directional) scanner antenna. All those TV antenna accessories worked great for your scanner antenna.
Of course, Radio Shack sold scanners, they probably outsold all the rest of the companies’ combined due to the many hundreds of stores all over the US. They had a wide variety of handheld and desktop scanners over the years. While they may not always have been the best or feature-filled scanners around, the build quality was always better than average. Older Bearcat and Regency scanners were well known for cold solder joints, flaky power supplies and other issues that were pretty much absent on Radio Shack scanners back in the day. Look to other Scanner Tales for a more in-depth look at these.
Other than scanners, crystals and scanner accessories Radio Shack sold a few ham radios now and then. While the company started as a supplier for ham and maritime radio operators it pivoted away towards more commercial product lines but would occasionally come home to roost. In later years they sold some basic 2-Meter handhelds and 10-Meter mobiles. These were similar to their marine and CB lines respectively. I am pretty sure that some of the 2-meter products were built by Icom or perhaps the same supplier as Icom as they used similar cases and batteries.
I almost forgot to mention the crystals! Every Radio Shack sold scanner and CB crystals. They would usually have a decent selection for the local police and fire channels, and you could order any others you wanted. $4.95 each, plus tax with free shipping to your home. If the manager at your local Radio Shack was a scanner guy he would have a better selection, the guy who ran the store in my town loved to watch the Soo Line trains go past his store, so he always had crystals for 161.370 and later 161.085 available.
Over the years I think everyone had some sort of Radio Shack stereo gear. While I was pretty much a Kenwood guy in my apartment (my stereo cost more than all my furniture) I usually had a Radio Shack speaker system, tape deck or something. Radio Shack sold one of the few 8-track recording decks around. My Dad, who stuck by 8-tracks much longer than anyone else on the planet, had 2 so he could copy one to another for use in his car. I had one as well but gave up on 8-track after cassettes got popular. Radio Shack sold blank 8-track tapes to go along with the recorder and Dad and I had dozens of them.
I did have a Radio Shack stereo in the car. My typical installation was an AM/FM with tape deck (8-Track then cassette) with 5-inch round speakers in the door and 6x9’s in the rear package shelf. I also would put an outboard power amplifier and graphic equalizer to keep the neighbors up at night.
One thing I wished I still had was the Minimus-7 speakers. These were durable, metal cased and small but packed a punch. I had 4 of these in the apartment but when I was able to afford larger and louder speakers, I started to use these on my scanners. They worked great! If you run across these at a thrift shop grab them!
Another staple of 70’s and 80’s stereo installations was the Graphic Equalizer. I had no idea what it did or why I needed it, but I had to have one on both my home and car stereo systems. It was just too cool to have a couple dozen slide controls to tailor the sound. I usually just played with the sliders until it sounded good but really had no clue why that setting worked. Even better was the flashing lights that changed with the music.
Back to scanner stuff (I know I have been bouncing around a lot…)! Of course, we know all about Police Call and how they were sold at Radio Shack. They even had the Radio Shack name on them. Most decent Radio Shack stores had their own frequency lists, often posted near the scanners. I would often program the scanners in mall stores with the security channel for that mall, I even got yelled once at by a wannabe Paul Blart since he was right behind me when I did. He tried the “It is illegal to listen to” spiel on me but I told him to prove it. While he could have kicked me out of the mall (once I left Radio Shack that is) he figured it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
Many of us had Navaho CB radios, I always wanted one of those base station rigs but made do with mobiles on a power supply. They used to sell a “Space Patrol” base CB that had a single crystal controlled transmit channel (usually Channel 14) and a tunable receiver. It would transmit at the 1/10 watt allowed for license free operations at the time. We all had these in our neighborhood and some of use rigged up a crystal socket on the top of the radio so we could easily change to a different channel. The trick was to get the receive channel tuned in properly. We even tried some split-channel stuff when Tom would transmit on Channel 7 and listen on 14 and I would do just the opposite. My Dad was not too happy when I connected this radio to our TV antenna, every time I would talk it would mess with the picture while he was watching “Bonanza” or “Lawrence Welk”.
CB radio started getting really popular in the late 60’s, by the mid 70’s everyone had CB’s in their car and many of us had them at home. I had the most basic 23-channel radio, the famous TRC24 and a 5/8 wave antenna on the roof of the house. I cut grass all summer long to buy that setup, even in 1970 it cost something like $250 with all the parts and an entire Saturday for Dad and I to install the antenna. Dad had a small 6-channel Radio Shack CB in the family station wagon. I had a 6-channel Midland CB walkie-talkie that I used on my bike.
In 1977 the FCC expanded CB to 40 channels, and I remember going to Radio Shack on New Years Eve to get any remaining 23-channel radios they had since they could not sell them in the new year. I was able to get 3 23-channel CB’s at one store for $10 each and 4 more for $15 each in the next town. I kept the best one (with SSB!) for my car and sold the rest from time to time for a profit.
During the 2000’s Radio Shack hit a rough patch and after several bad business decisions and a changing business climate they started the slow death rattle. Eventually it all but disappeared, much like CompUSA, Bed Bath and Beyond, Circuit City and others. While one can get just about anything online these days the ability to drive into town and get a resistor or antenna was gone and sorely missed by many.
