Old National NC "69" radio

[grumpy]

I picked up an Old National NC "69" shortwave radio some time ago. I finally got around to checking it out an found that the dang thing still works. Just wondering if anyone here is interested int it. Otherwise shes going on Ebay in the next day or so.

Dave

[Kamakiri]

Yup, I'm in for that....name a price and post a pic. I got rid of my National NC-188 years ago, and lived to regret it!

[grumpy]

Hi Kam

I have not a clue as to what its worth. There is not much for me to refernce a price to. You prolly know alot more about it and its value than I will ever know. I ran it for a bit with no antenna and the AM worked awesome. I did not try anything else mostly casue I dont know how to. Here is a couple of pics. It aint perfect but I figure it atleast 30-35 years old. For its age I think it looks pretty darn good.

Dave

[grumpy]

Oh Yeah excuse the mess. We have been having a garage sale all day and the house is a mess

Dave

[Kamakiri]

Give me a day to see if I can find a fair market value. I'm definitely interested.

I'm not a Boat anchor expert but that looks just like the National NC 60. The NC 60 I had was a 1958 a 5 tuber just like that. I've seen a few around at flea markets for $25.00 to $40.00. I had one of these when I was 13. I traded it for a telescope after a tube when out. It didn't pick up to bad for a 5 tube( mine probally could have used an alignment though.
Rod

[grumpy]

Kam

ya still interested in the NC radio. If not let me know so I can throw it on Ebay. Thanks

Dave

[Kamakiri]

Yup. Would $40 do?

[Jeffhs]

These receivers were made for shortwave listeners and beginning amateur (ham) radio operators, and were new about 50 years ago, give or take a year or two. The four-band continuous coverage went from the low end of the broadcast band (550 KHz or 0.55 MHz) to 30 MHz, but the sensitivity wasn't all that good at the higher frequencies (hence the need for a very good antenna to get any kind of reception at all on these frequencies). They were great for SW listeners and hams of the 1950s on tight budgets, but usually, as one progresses in these hobbies the desire is for more sophisticated gear the longer one is involved in it. If this set goes on ebay, I wouldn't pay more than $20-30 for it, given the simplicity of the circuitry and the low sensitivity above about 14 MHz (20 meters).

The earlier receivers were just as bad, if not worse in this regard. My dad had a Hallicrafters receiver which dated to 1936, which later became my first shortwave set when I became interested in ham radio in the late 1960s. It would not work at all without an antenna; even with a decent antenna such as a longwire or dipole, it would not work well, or in some cases and on some frequencies at all, above 14 MHz. The reason these old sets were such lousy performers at the higher frequencies was that they were not actually made to be used as communications receivers in amateur stations, etc. In fact, most of these were just broadcast receivers with shortwave coverage added as an afterthought. The BFO (beat frequency oscillator for reception of Morse code or CW signals) and AVC (automatic volume control) circuits of these crude SW sets were as simple as the manufacturers could get away with, while still keeping the price within what would have been fair market range at the time. Moreover, the SW performance of these receivers was probably not much better than that of the expensive multi-band console radios (Zenith, RCA, et al.) of the period.

I wonder about the claim made that this set picked up stations on the AM broadcast band without an antenna. I've been a ham radio operator for over 30 years, and know for a fact these receivers cannot possibly operate without some sort of antenna connected to them--unless the person who made this claim lives very close to one or more powerful AM or FM broadcast stations. I once lived near a powerful (27,500 watts ERP) FM station on 92.3 MHz whose signal forced its way into anything and everything with either a radio tuner or an amplifier (including my dad's Ampex Micro 88 stereo cassette recorder, my TV set on channel 6, and even at several points on the 10-meter amateur radio band on the receiver [Hallicrafters SX101A] in my Novice amateur radio station). The station's tower was less than a mile from where I lived (I could see the tower from my third-floor bedroom window at night, when its lights were on), so one can easily imagine that the signal at my location was tremendous. Believe me, it was. If I had had fillings or braces on my teeth at that time (I didn't), I probably would have been hearing the station in my head all day and all night!

Good luck and very kind regards,

[Jeffhs]

The National Company also made communications receivers for the U. S. military during World War II. These were solidly built receivers that weighed a ton! My dad had one (the Army's designation for it was RAO-7) in his workshop in our basement for years, but I think the power transformer may have given up the ghost (or else the rectifier tube[s] went West) as by the time I moved out of our house in 1999 the set hadn't been working for some time. The RAO-7 was an all-band receiver, covering 550 KHz (kilocycles in the war years until 1967) to 30 MHz in five bands. I listened to Morse code practice from the American Radio Relay League's headquarters amateur radio station W1AW, as well as other amateur and SW stations, on this set as part of my early training for an amateur license. The receiver had just about every high-end feature one could imagine, such as a Q-multiplier (what hams used to call a Q5-er years ago), a real analog S-meter (not a flimsy, useless LCD bargraph display such as is common on today's receivers and even amateur transceivers), variable RF gain, a bandswitch you couldn't wear out if you tried (the coils were on a turret turned by the huge bandswitch knob on the front panel), et al.

The RAO-7's performance, moreover, would put many of today's inexpensive SW sets to shame. Hook up a decent antenna to this monster and you could hear just about any station from Maine to Miami on the broadcast band, not to mention U.S. and foreign broadcast stations on SW. This receiver was, IMO, one of the best sets National ever made; I'm sure many beginning postwar DXers would have given their right arm for a set like this, as they were built for long-distance reception (again, with a good antenna connected).

I always liked National's stylized "NC" logo, which was inside a diamond shape on the front panels of all WWII and later vintage National communications receivers (and the company's television sets from the early 1950s until the firm finally went out of business, probably either in the late '50s or very early '60s). The C in the logo was formed by adding two short horizontal lines to the top and bottom of the right side of the N. I wonder if National got the idea for this logo from NBC-TV's old "snake" identification, which it used (along with the NBC chimes) after every NBC television program from the mid-fifties through the mid-seventies?
The B in that logo was formed by two loops added to the right side of the N, and the C snaked across the bottom of what became NBC's signature to finish it off.

[Sandy G]

Guys- I think the NC-60/69 was the successor to the 1951-58 SW-54. It had 5 tubes as well, & mine ain't anything to write home about in the sensitivity dept. National DID make some excellent radios- I have an NC-183D, & an HRO 50T1, which are very good, but I still feel a Hammarlund SP-600 has 'em beat. Or go for it- get an R-390A, a good one, & you'll throw rocks at the rest. This l'il fella's worth maybe 30-50 bucks if its in excellent cosmetic shape,but you're probably gonna have to replace the caps in it at some time. I'd just do it anyway, & not have to worry.-Sandy G.