[Jeffhs]

The president of the local ham radio club has a Radio Shack shortwave receiver in his ham station--might be the DX-300 but I'm not sure. His has a keypad for random-access frequency entry and digital readout. He says the set's been working very well since he's had it (I don't know how long, though).

As to Radio Shack's store personnel, I will say that some of them do know electronics. There is an RS store about five miles from me; their employees seem to know what they are looking at (and what their customers are talking about) when it comes to components, cables, etc. I've been a customer of theirs since the '70s, and have never had any trouble with them understanding my inquiries as to parts, equipment and so on. Granted, some RS employees may not know much about electronics or computers, etc. but the ones I've dealt with are quite knowledgeable. Perhaps the store clerks who don't seem to know their way around electronics are new to RS, having come to work there from some other business unrelated to electronics or IT (information technology). I would think, however, that a large national corporation such as Radio Shack would be more careful in screening its applicants for jobs within the company, hiring only people who know the difference, say, between an RJ-11 telephone jack and a USB connector. This whole thing reminds me of a cartoon I saw in an electronics magazine about 15 or so years ago, in which two employees of a TV service shop were looking at an older TV set that had come in for repair. The technicians were used to seeing solid-state TVs, not old ones like this with tubes, so when one of them took the back off the set and saw all these glowing glass tubes inside, he looked at the other and asked him what they were. The other tech said they were vacuum tubes. The first then gave the second one a puzzled glance and shot back, "What the hell is a vacuum tube?"