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Old 04-29-2004, 12:48 PM
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Paula Paula is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 110
My Zenith Royal 20

Here are some pictures of my early-sixties, eight-transistor Zenith Royal 20 radio. It's in excellent condition and plays beautifully. The Royal 20 is a fairly common model, but seems to be very well-designed and constructed. It was one of the first portables that Zenith made in Hong Kong, having at last thrown in the towel in trying to compete with the Japanese in this line.

The entire front of the radio is a single zinc die casting, heavily chromed on the exterior. The chrome plating is in mint condition, except that it is starting to show some small pits (just like that huge, potmetal hood ornament on your granddaddy's DeSoto). But these are down in the grooved areas, and don't show up too much. The one-piece pebbled back cover is made of plastic, and is like new. There's no separate door or cover to access the batteries, you have to remove a single, coin-slot screw, and remove the entire cover. This radio uses the now-discontinued E640 camera batteries, though they can still be found if you look around.

An interesting feature of this radio is its angled volume control. On radios where the tuning knob is mounted directly to the tuning capacitor's shaft (not "geared down" in some fashion), it is desirable to have as large a diameter knob as will practically fit within the overall design of the radio, as it makes it easier to "fine-tune". The designers of the Royal 20 made its tuning knob almost as wide as the radio itself, and this required them to mount the volume control at an angle, as you can somewhat see in the picture below. The two knobs actually "overlap" slightly, and the volume control knob is cone-shaped to make its knurled circumference parallel with the side of the radio.

An unfortunate consequence of using such a large tuning knob is that the size of the speaker had to be restricted. The oval-shaped speaker only occupies the bottom half of the face, and measures a scant 1-1/8 x 1-3/4 inches.

The radio itself measures 2-3/8 x 2-3/4 x 1-1/4 inches, and was obviously designed to compete with a number of other manufacturers who were turning out "sub-miniature" radios. Even so, as you can see from the picture below, the Royal 20 is a hulk compared to Standard's Micronic Ruby.

Paula


Last edited by Paula; 05-11-2006 at 03:46 PM.
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