Sanjean ATS 404, from the landfill
 

Found this little guy at our local landfill. All my portables are large Zeniths and GEs. Most made here. This little radio is cute. Wondered why it got tossed. Works. Had a dirty volume control. Has digital tuning. It’s very sensitive. Has a clock display too. Small compared to my other radios

When I was a pup, long, long ago, I found a busted up AM/FM portable radio in the garbage. I took it home, applied batteries, and while the FM didn't work, the AM did after a fashion. My bedroom was in the basement and reception was "gangbusters" next to the sewer stack. I got stations all over the country!

People throw out things for all sorts of reasons. I've got a working TVs from separate groups of folks that one day forgot how to turn them on.

If it was a grundig shortwave I'd be able to tell you why it got tossed. The only grundig portable shortwave radio I ever bought new got returned to radio shack (I think once for another then for my money back) because the battery contacts were intermittent. Not much better than a dollar store no name SW set.
The Sony ICF-7600GR I replaced it with on the other hand has been excellent the nearly 15 years I've had it.

I have a Zenith T/O multiband portable radio (an eBay score years ago) that works on FM and all shortwave bands, but not AM. The FM band on mine is very sensitive, as I can receive stations 100+ miles away from my home (including a few from Windsor and London, Ontario, Canada, since I live only a half-mile or so from Lake Erie), using only the built-in antenna, when the weather and atmospheric conditions are right; the sound quality is excellent through a good set of hi-fi headphones as well.

BTW, Zenith really knew their onions when it came to the T/O series and just about every other radio, TV and stereo system they made; it was a darn shame they eventually left Chicago and went to Korea in the late 1980s. (I've liked Zenith gear as long as I can remember, and still have several Zenith radios here today.) I had a Zenith AM/FM/stereo FM/phono/8-track stereo system in the '80s that served me very well. The only reason I gave it up and bought an Aiwa digital CD/AM/FM/cassette stereo bookshelf system in the late '90s was I had moved to a very small apartment by then, and had no room for the big Zenith stereo anymore.

Just as well, I guess, as the new (at the time) Aiwa bookshelf unit has a four-channel (50 watts per channel) audio system, for a grand total of 200 (!) watts, and two 3-way speakers. My system is twenty years old (I bought it the year I moved to my apartment), and it still works as well as it did when new. The only thing that eventually went wrong was when the dual cassette decks quit about 15 years ago; however, I replaced them with a Radio Shack stereo cassette deck. The rest of the bookshelf system, as I said, still works as well as when it was new (like Timex watches: "it ...keeps on ticking"). However, if Zenith were still an American company in Chicago I would have stayed with them, but, since the company went out of business in the late '90s, I had no choice but to go with the Aiwa system when the time came to give up my 5WPC Zenith one. Hated to do it, but for the reasons I mentioned, it had to go when I moved.