I was taking out my garbage this afternoon, when I saw a recent-vintage (I would guess late '80s-'90s) Panasonic RX-FS400 boom box AM/FM/FM-stereo cassette sitting in a box near one of the trash barrels. I picked it up and brought it home (just a few steps; the trash barrels are at the back of the apartment building where I live), plugged it in (the AC cord was plugged into the AC socket at the back of the unit), turned it on, and...what do you know, it worked. The FM antenna was broken off at the base; nevertheless, the FM radio still brought in every major station in Cleveland. The AM worked just as well. (I replaced the FM antenna with one from an old GE boombox I had laying around; now the Panasonic unit works much better, pulling in most FM stations within 40 miles of here in stereo--including two NPR affiliates, one of which is a low-power translator about 15 miles away.)
Well, I just couldn't resist cleaning up this thing, so I did--almost as soon as I got in my door with it. Cleaned up very nicely, although the previous owner had left the batteries in it far too long, as evidenced by electrolyte leakage around the old cells. There is still a bit of electrolyte residue in the battery compartment, but the set works well on AC regardless. Tried it with a cassette in the tape deck; that worked as well. The only thing missing is the battery compartment cover.
It never ceases to amaze me how many perfectly good radios, TVs, stereo systems, etc. get thrown out simply because of minor problems such as broken antennas (which was really the only thing wrong with this one--everything else works). Panasonic was and likely still is a very respected name in audio and video; they build their equipment to last, as attested to on their website (
www.panasonic.com). If only people would realize this before throwing out a perfectly good Panasonic unit; after all, it wouldn't have been that much trouble to replace the broken antenna, but some people figure, I guess, that when the antenna breaks as the one on this one did, the set is immediately declared worthless and thrown in the trash--even if the unit otherwise works well. However, I look at it this way: It is because people trash old radios, TVs, stereos, etc. that we AKers find the units we have in our collections--at least that's one way we find them. I am not a really big Panasonic fan (I mainly collect Zenith radios), but when I saw that Pana boom box sitting all by its lonesome in the trash today, I just couldn't let it sit there, awaiting its one-way trip to the landfill.