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Originally Posted by OldWolf
Aren't these models called "Long Range" receivers or some similar? I thought I read that somewhere.
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Yes. The phrase Zenith used was "Long Distance." Most older Zenith radios had this printed on the back covers, underneath the "Zenith." The company dropped the designation, however (I think), when they started making radios in Taiwan. Neither my Zenith R-70 portable nor my H480 Zenith clock radio, both made in 1980, have this anywhere on their cabinets (for that matter, neither does my 1958 TransOceanic transistor portable), but the other sets in my collection do show it prominently on the back. These radios lived up to the claims made in the slogan, though--all my Zeniths will pick up all sorts of distant stations on AM at night. My C845 is a real distance champion, though, as it will receive stations like crazy at night when the band opens up, not to mention getting Cleveland stations during the day my other radios do not hear at all, or so poorly as to be unlistenable. It does a fantastic job with weak FM signals as well. I can often hear stations 50 to 100 miles from here with signals good enough to listen to; this using only the radio's internal FM antenna--think of the stations you'd hear with a good outdoor FM antenna or even just a cheap set of TV rabbit ears! These sets must have sold like hotcakes in rural areas, miles away from the nearest station. With their high-performance signal circuits, not to mention high-fidelity sound, I wouldn't be surprised if they did. I sometimes plug in my C845 and just listen around the AM radio dial at night. There's a whole world of AM stations out there, and Zenith radios do one whale of a job picking them up at night. All you hear on AM during the day as a rule are your hometown stations and a few semi-locals, but at night the rest of the country is heard from...and your Zenith can hear it all or at least much of it, depending where in the US you live; here in northeastern Ohio, I can hear AM stations up and down the East Coast and Eastern Seaboard, west to Indiana and a bit beyond, as well as much of southwestern Ontario, Canada. My favorite Canadian station is CHWO AM 740 in Toronto, big bands and standards, as well as two stations about 90 miles from here with the same format, not to mention a 5-kW oldies station 35 miles east of here (and most of the local stations from Cleveland, of course). My C845 gets them all, and well. Zenith did not refer to its 1920s-'70s radios as "Long Distance" for nothing.