Americana "last gasp" AM only transistor radio

[Sandy G]

I have the Tooob era equivalents of these Bad Boiz-a couple of pre-war Arvin sets-One has 2 tubes, & the other one has 3. They were salesmen's or travelers' sets, designed to be thrown in a suitcase, & they do a reasonable job of picking up the local Angel Modulation station in whatever town you found yrself in. They were both under $12, I think, new, so even back then if they got "borrowed" or lost it wasn't a big deal. The mighty 2-tube special, I think, ALMOST picked up WLAC, 1510 in Nashville one night...

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

I have the Tooob era equivalents of these Bad Boiz-a couple of pre-war Arvin sets-One has 2 tubes, & the other one has 3. They were salesmen's or travelers' sets, designed to be thrown in a suitcase, & they do a reasonable job of picking up the local Angel Modulation station in whatever town you found yrself in. They were both under $12, I think, new, so even back then if they got "borrowed" or lost it wasn't a big deal. The mighty 2-tube special, I think, ALMOST picked up WLAC, 1510 in Nashville one night...

I had an Arvin model 540T 5-tube BC-only radio from at least the 1950s in a green metal cabinet (a shock hazard waiting to happen ) I got from my aunt and uncle in the late '60s-early seventies when they were cleaning up their house. It had an external wire antenna and worked reasonably well in my area (at the time), east suburban Cleveland; however, I wouldn't have trusted whatever insulation there was between the chassis and the cabinet, as the grommets (if there were any) had probably disintegrated and were worse than useless as insulation material by the time I got the radio.

Where I live today, 33 miles from downtown Cleveland and ten-fifteen miles further from the city's radio stations, however, I don't know how well that Arvin set would have worked; for all I know it might have been a decent performer here, at least on the local station five miles from my apartment. It would definitely fail miserably trying to pick up a 0.5-kW day/0.042kW (42 watts, directional night pattern) station near where I grew up; that is, the radio might get the station during the day, but just barely. After sundown, forget it; the station's gnat-sighing-through-a-window-screen-at-ten-paces 42-watt night signal, along with the sharply directional nighttime antenna pattern, very neatly exclude my area, and everywhere else east of me, from their coverage--all night long, until the following morning (the station has a PSA, pre-sunrise authorization, to operate at reduced power if sunrise occurs before 6 a.m. local time, but I still wouldn't hear it here until well after dawn--and if I did hear it before then, it would be so weak as to be unlistenable).

These radios, as you mentioned, were built only for local AM reception; your 2- and 3-tube sets more so than mine was (I don't have mine anymore), but not by much.