Getting back to my Zenith Transoceanic 3000-1: Is there any way to increase the sensitivity of this radio on FM by means of adjustments to trimmers, etc.? The set has a separate FM tuner. In my area (I am some 35 miles from downtown Cleveland and about ten miles further from the transmitters, most of which are located in a southwestern suburb of the city) it will receive every commercial Cleveland FM station but one (using its built-in Waverod FM/SW antenna) quite well, but it doesn't do so well with the low-power college, university and translator stations below 92 MHz. There are at least two stations, one of which is a translator for an NPR station some 60 miles from here, in that part of the FM band which I would like to be able to listen to. I realize the Royal 3000-1, built in 1966, was one of the first transistor portable radios with FM, but I would think it would have been designed, as are almost all older Zenith radios, to receive low-power and other weak stations where other sets fail to do so. I can hear the NPR translator on 89.1 MHz quite well, actually, as the transmitter is only a few miles away, but the signal sounds distorted; the other stations come in very well. I am currently charging the radio's batteries (it was modified by its previous owner to use rechargeable NiCad cells rather than the usual nine D cells) on a hunch that the batteries may be weak, thereby reducing the overall sensitivity of the set. If a freshly charged set of batteries does not cure the sensitivity problem, where else could it be? As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I am curious to know if there are other things I can do to get this radio working as it probably did 47 years ago, such as adjustments of antenna trimmers and such, although if the solution involves realignment, I won't touch it since I don't have a signal generator or alignment instructions. Again, I am aware that the Royal 3000-1 was one of the first portable radios to cover the FM broadcast band, but somehow I think mine could do better than it does in the signal-pulling department, short of using an external FM antenna. Also, the AM sensitivity of the Royal 3000 does not seem up to par. I can get most of the AM stations in Cleveland, its suburbs and outlying areas, but I cannot hear AM 740 in Toronto (for example). The dial calibration seems quite far off on the low end of the AM band as well; for instance, WJR 760 in Detroit comes in at about 650 or thereabouts on the dial, and WGR 550 in Buffalo, usually very good here, doesn't come in at all on my Royal 3000. This (and the FM sensitivity problem) seems well out of character for any radio made by Zenith. Was the quality of their radios starting a downward spiral in the mid-1960s that continued until the company exited the radio business in the early '80s?
