I cut my teeth on my dad's Hallicrafters S-20R. When I was a young kid and had to stay home from school on sick days, he'd put it next to the bed and let me dial around. Even without an outside antenna, I would pick up some amazing sounds in exotic languages.
Later in my 20s came a hand-me-down Zenith Trans-Oceanic tube model with the detachable loop antenna. From my rented farmhouse in Massachusetts, I DX'd dozens of faraway AM stations and a bunch of SW. One night a dry resistor cracked open and the whole issue went up in a brown cloud.
After that years later, a Sangean portable, an Icom PCR1000, and now a $25 SDR dongle on a Linux laptop. If I were offered any one of these again today, out of any of them, I would definitely take the S-20R followed by the Icom.
Digital tuning is great. SDR's are new and fun to play with.
But, there's just something about air variable tuning caps and vacuum tubes. I just feel more connected to that distant voice
Yes, it may drift a bit with line voltage changes. And, sometimes the band switch is a little noisey. But, it still feels and sounds better.
The mention of Cathedral radios reminded me of three very old radios from my childhood that I played with for hours; Zenith, Philco and Spartan.
My favorite had to be the Sangean ATS 818, I had the Radio Shack version "Realistic DX 390". It is/was a great receiver.
I have considered buying another one from Ebay, it was just a lot fun to tune around the bands with on a long wire antenna. It sure beats the Grundig G3 I have now.
The radio.
Okay, perhaps it's cheating, but right now Im a big fan of WEBSDR.ORG
Using it, I can tune in on any one of 160 SDR receivers peppered all over the world. I can hear stations I had never thought possible from countries I would never visit in my lifetime.
It lacks the charm of fiddling with dials and trimming antennas, but it works well and brings me the same world of wonder my Dad's old Hallicrafters did.
I'm on my second. Such quality after
60 plus years. It has held calibration
after all this time.
I've been fortunate to have used many
radios. I also had an HQ-170C and
an HQ-100.
I kick myself for not buying that used
Japan Radio Company NRD-515 in
1983. I could talk for hours about this
stuff.
Brooce
Regarding the weird sounds
heard on the shortwave bands
- - I heard jammers also. A lot
of them
sounded like propeller driven
airplanes. And that's what I thought they
were. As if some guy was flying a plane
with the mike stuck in the transmit
position. Decades and decades later
I did hear exactly that! In the 108 - 136
MHz aircraft band late at night was the
sound of a real prop plane. It sounded
like a big aircraft with 2 engines. I could
hear the sounds of the motors phasing
with each other - I think. I heard it for
a while - and rhen the noise just faded
away.
Brooce
Lately it's still been the Zenith TO Y600. Love good tube radios!
Before I upgraded to a 140X I had a Knight Kit Ocean Hopper. It was a regen receiver and a very simple circuit. I only had money enough for the single AM band coil. I got gutsy enough to modify the coil based on coil windings from "How to Become a Radio Amateur." It worked! I was able to hear CW and decode SSB signals for the first time. I was 14 years old at the time.
My Dad built an Ocean Hopper back in the '50s....I was a bit young to help much, but did a LOT of watching as he soldered parts and mounted tube sockets....IIRC, this little unit COULD drive a speaker, but Dad used the (supplied??) single-element headset....
Dad had coils for all bands from BCB to 10 meters.....and a 50' long-wire antenna strung across the roof of our house made for some interesting listening...my first recollection was Radio Cologne -- they were playing the American Banstand theme song ("Bandstand Boogie" by Les Elgart).....this was 1958.....I was 6!!! Even at that tender age I knew radio was going to be more for me than just a box to listen to.....After nearly 30 years as an announcer and engineer I'm "semi-retired".....still running my Part 15 FM on weekends and - at the moment -trying to breathe new life into some vintage cart machines!!:)
I wish I still had my Ocean Hopper.
Back in Post # 3 I talked about my Zenith Transoceanic Radio and I have two more things to say about it.
It is a very stable analog tuning radio with dial tuning and an pointer that sweeps from left to right pointing at frequency numbers. By "stable" I mean it doesn't drift. Well, sometimes it drifts just a little bit over a long period of time but here's why it matters to me...
When I DX, which means when I listen for station reception across the dial and on different bands, there's no thrill with digital tuning that is more like little windows that peer at limited chunks of dial but keep the listener outside of the experience.
With a vernier tuning knob it feels like you are there, in the experience, part of the ether. Much more worthwhile.
All three of the analog dial tuning radios purchased in recent years are junk because they drift by the minute.
There is a beautiful looking little Grundig AM/FM/SW that is so terrible on shortwave that strong stations come in at two places on the dial and when stations are tuned in they're suddenly not tuned in and have to be searched for all over again. On AM the stations need to be re-tuned every 5-minutes.
I got a large Grundig U1 Construction Site Radio that looks like a yellow gas meter with a 4-Watt audio amplifier which is wonderfully sensitive on both AM & FM but it needs to be re-tuned every few seconds and the drift has no relation to the ambient temperature.
And the final iteration of the fabled Super Radio available briefly from C.Crane sounds wonderful but tuning a station in takes frustrating patience because the thing jumps off frequency as it's just about tuned in, over and over again.
Now back to the Transoceanic which has one major disappointment... despite having many shortwave band selections, it does not tune to 13.560 MHz and that's the channel we use for Part 15 transmission!
The bottom line is, if the radios are junk the hobby falls flat.
I'm going away mad.
I recently added a new Tecsun PL-600. LW, AM. FM, SW with BFO for SSB and CW.
So far, seems to work very well.