RCA Victor score
 

I'm not normally a SS guy, but I just couldn't pass this up for $12 at a thrift shop. Heavy, real wood cabinet in beautiful shape, with a light bulb in the faceplate. From what info. I could gather, the Sams Photofact for this model is dated 1966 (unfortunately, it's missing from my Sams collection). I do know that RCA dropped "Victor" in late '68 which means its one of RCA's earliest SS table radios. It has a remarkably tube-like sound when the tone control is adjusted properly. I really like it!

The rca service data index says 1965, hmm i wonder if i have that. Nice table radio. Does anyone even make table radios anymore? Or just those boom box things

I think the days of the table radio are over, boom boxes having taken their place; in fact, CD and cassette boomboxes are all but obsolete today as well, since the trend nowadays seems to be towards mp3 players -- even CD car stereos are being forced into obsolescence by today's FM/mp3 (only) systems (I saw a JVC mp3 car stereo advertised in a Best Buy flyer in my Sunday paper a few weeks ago) that can download music from the Internet and/or play the user's mp3 files.

I have several table sets here (with tubes), all but one of them working quite well. The one that isn't presently working is a 1965 Zenith MJ1035, with a defective 2-megohm dual volume pot. The radio actually works, brings in lots of stations, but the audio is so weak, even with the control at maximum, that it is barely audible. There is a loud 60-Hz AC hum as well, which tells me the filter caps are overdue to be replaced. One of these days...

I stand corrected, date codes on internal parts indicate this was probably built in late '65 (no doubt for the '65-'66 model year). It even has vent holes in the back board as if to vent tubes. BTW, do any of you know when RCA stopped making radios in the US?

IIRC, right around 1968. Some were Sanyo and some were Hitachi. The first ones were labeled "Radio Corporation of America", with the earlier RCA logo.
The later ones were labeled with the new RCA logo only. :yes:

I wonder how much longer the am and fm analog broadcast format will be around.
These freaks and companies in charge have no issue making huge changes to obsolete a technology that works for the profit and to cut rural people off.

They killed analog cellular and it took phone service away from lots of rural ranches and farms because digital has hard distance limits. They got rid of analog ntsc tv and we all know how well that works.

If they can get rid of Rush and other conservative talk they will kill the AM band.

Then for the FM band the company that holds control on that HD crap would like to get rid of analog and take over. They can fit way more stations in the same space and have a much lower transmitter power.
Then they would come out with some crappy HD radio converter box from china that lasts 6 months.

Some AM stations have quietly turned off their digital garbage. You won't hear the hash in their sidebands now. You never hear ads for radios that can tune that stuff any more.

As to table radios today, maybe about the only ones are compact hi-fi types like Tivoli, some clock radios, and iPod docking sets. The Tivolis and their ilk are the only ones that remotely resemble table radios of yore.

Interesting, not only do I have one of RCA's earliest SS table radios, it is also one of their last....I guess they just couldn't compete against the onslaught of cheaper Japanese radios (something the Japanese are now experiencing with cheaper Chinese electronics).

I once worked in a thrift shop. The crappy Radio/CD player they had at the time running through a commercial amp was driving me nuts. Scratchy static mixed with music was all that filled the store. Then one day somebody...for some strange and unknown reason...donated a nice, shiny Tivoli Model One radio...like manna from the gods! I said to the manager, "That's our new store radio." Ran the thing through the headphone jack into the amp and presto, lot's of crystal clear radio stations without static throughout the entire store. Years later, they are still using it, and I don't even work there any more.

This soon-to-be-released stereo / analog tune/ wood cabinet/ sub-woofer equipped model from from Sangean looks like a nice traditional table radio:

http://www.universal-radio.com/catal...alty/4012.html

not affiliated,
jr

Thats great news because there is such a hunger out there for vintage table radios right now. And especially vintage hi fi receivers.
If i wanted to advertise that I fixed the stuff I would have more work than I know what to do with.
I currently fix about one a week for a local shop and thats enough. They can be major time vampires.

Nice score on the RCA! Take care of it and you will have a companion for life.

Nifty-looking Sangean. Too bad it isn't made here, so me no buy. Makes it a no-brainer to keep buying, restoring and enjoying the ones that were.

AM radio was such a treat for an only child growing up in the 1960's. My dad bought me a Hallicrafters S-22R after a Philco 615 failed and a Zenith console proved too weak to DX with. Later, an S-120, and in 1969, I took my paper-route profits and bought a Lafayette HA-600. What a P.O.S that turned out to be.

I spent hundreds of hours DX'ing stations from Honolulu to New Orleans. Always top-40 music to enjoy. Never a disparaging word, just spread-spectrum interference from the Sears TV in the living room and the oil-burning furnace in the basement.

Sad to say, nothing proves the old adage "you can't go back" better than a visit to AM radio these days. Hundreds of gasbags fill the airwaves, the majority spewing lies and filth hardly fit for the ears of a child. Almost any station playing an all-music format does so with eqipment, not live, entertaining personalities. And more commercials than ever. R.I.P AM radio.

Some of us prefer to live in denial! I hope the huge installed number of car radios keeps AM/FM alive for years to come. Around here new FM stations keep coming on the air, so it's not as though there's a lack of interest in the format from that end.

That Sangean is a pretty neat interpretation of a table radio.

On RCA dropping "Victor" in '68: that would be about 39 or so years after RCA bought Victor. I wonder if there was an agreement to use the Victor name for X number of years. Sometimes that happens with a buyout. Probably not, with Sarnoff in charge: he pretty much did what he wanted.

Standard AM/FM radio could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn't miss it. These days, I don't bother much with AM or FM radio (haven't listened to AM for years), preferring instead to listen to my own CDs ripped into my computer or to an easy-listening Internet station from northwestern Indiana (The Breeze, www.thebreez.com -- "breez" is not a typo) that plays easy listening. I have radios here that will pick up several AM music stations from towns 80-100 miles away, but since I listen mainly to Internet radio and my own CDs/cassettes I have no use for automated AM or FM broadcast stations.

You are so right as to "more commercials than ever" on commercial AM/FM radio. Many stations will run very long strings of commercials, maybe five or ten minutes' worth, for every few (!) minutes of music they play.

Yes, "RIP AM radio" is just about right. Speaking of "RIP", this can also be said for new CD car stereos; these days, many if not most car audio systems (I saw an ad for a JVC digital media receiver in my Sunday newspaper a few months ago) are being made without CD players, instead having mp3 players.

We said RIP to cassettes when CDs came in (although some people, myself included, have many old cassettes and even a stereo cassette deck on which to play them -- at 56 years of age I grew up with cassettes and 8-track tape, so I have a vast collection of cassettes here, and even owned a Zenith 4-mode stereo system with an eight-track player 30+ years ago).

It looks like the CD's days are numbered as well with the advent of mp3 digital car stereos, many of which, such as the JVC digital audio receiver I mentioned above, will play only mp3 files -- there is no CD deck built into the system. In fact, the ad for this particular system stated right up front that "this unit does not play CDs", no doubt to avoid confusion or the buyer thinking the CD deck was omitted from the stereo purposely.

You obviously don't live where reports on traffic, weather, street flooding or crime scenes are of importance. Cabot Cove I guess.

I live in a small town near Lake Erie, over 30 miles from Cleveland, but not so far out in the boondocks that I, or anyone else living in this area, can afford not to know what's going on in the so-called "big city" of Cleveland. What I meant was I would not miss the gabby disk jockeys and long strings of commercials on today's AM and FM radio stations. Of course the news reports on street flooding, weather, et al. are important, which is why I wish there was an all-news radio station in Cleveland (there isn't anymore, not since NBC's NNIS news service folded in the early 1980s; someone told me some time ago that Cleveland is too small a city to support an all news station, although the city did have an NNIS affiliate -- WERE 1300 AM -- in the late '70s until the service folded).

I do, however, listen to the new NBC News Radio network's one-minute newscasts on the local AM station here (WABQ 1460 AM in Painesville, five miles south of me). I would listen to all-news radio if this area had such a station, but since it doesn't, my clock radio remains tuned to 1460. The irony, however, is that Cleveland does have an all-sports FM station -- WKRK-FM, 92.3 in suburban Cleveland Heights, since a few months ago.

I can't figure that out. Cleveland is too small to have an all-news station, yet it is big enough to support an all-sports one. Maybe the powers-that-be at the all-sports station think that sports matters more to Cleveland people than the news does--no, I take that back. The reports of the school shootings in a city (Chardon) in Geauga County, Ohio several months ago were carried on the all-sports station the morning the shooting took place, and I'm sure the news of the theater shootings near Denver, Colorado was carried over that station and every other talk station in the city as well, so news radio is indeed important. The loudmouth DJs and seemingly-endless strings of commercials on the rock stations, however, can go to you-know-where as far as I am concerned. I realize radio and TV stations need a certain number of commercials to stay on the air, but eight or ten (or more[!]) of these things in a row is too much. There used to be an FCC rule limiting radio and TV commercial time to no more than one or, at most, two minutes in any given hour of the day; that rule was abolished almost 30 years ago when the agency deregulated broadcast radio, and one minute later, all H--- broke loose.

Oh, yeah...Our little Angel Modulation kuntry luvin' station, WRGS, is totally "Programmed", nothing live about it, which makes me slightly FURIOUS when we have a terrific snot-slingin' thunderstorm go thru, & you CAN'T find out ANYTHING pertinent. I, of course, know the owner of the station, & if I can remember, I'm gonna fuss at him about this...The canned "Tennessee Mutual News" to me, is NOT living up to the "Community Involvement" clause that I think is part of every station's charter & license...

Sandy, automated radio stations like your town's WRGS don't care about anything other than their own programming; should a thunderstorm or anything else happen these stations don't give a hoot about it, because they are programmed from national networks hundreds or thousands of miles away and are run at the local level by computers. The local talk station here, WABQ 1460, is exactly like that, with talk programming from something called the "Revolution Radio NetworK" and NBC News Radio at the top of every hour, but the only local programming is a 120-minute block of local news early in the morning. Once that is over the Revolution Radio Network comes in and is all that is heard over the station all day and night long, except of course for NBC's hourly 1-minute news summaries. Should a thunderstorm blow into the area at any time during these automated programs, the local station here would not interrupt its national programming for even a minute.

This is the way most if not all AM radio stations (except, of course, the big network-operated all-news ones in big cities like New York, Washington, Philadelphia, et al) are operated today, like it or not. They are automated, with no (or very, very little) live programming whatsoever, so Heaven help us if an emergency situation such as a severe thunderstorm pops up. The warning will almost certainly be seen and heard over local TV stations (because of the Emergency Alert System), but again, heaven help anyone who happens to be listening to a small automated AM station when the storm comes, unless the station's automation equipment is set up to cause the EAS warning to break in to the automated program if the need arises; however, I doubt that most automated stations are that sophisticated -- yet, anyway.

Television does a better job of informing the public of natural disasters (the local TV stations in Cleveland will begin a scheduled newscast with a weather bulletin if conditions are bad enough to warrant such action), but unfortunately, if such warnings are posted during working hours, most people will not see them as they are at work at this time. This is as good a reason as any to have a NOAA weather radio operating at all times. These radios will respond to emergency warnings (via a special signal sent from NOAA weather radio stations) and can be programmed to respond only to weather emergencies for specific areas such as individual counties. Some of these radios can even be set up to break in, if need be, to programming over a local FM station, replacing said programming with NOAA weather bulletins and/or emergency information; I have a Midland all-hazard weather warning receiver which will do just that in the event of a weather emergency.

This is, IMO, a much better way to keep informed of weather emergencies or severe weather than relying solely on AM or FM broadcast radio, or even TV. Television is not always accessible, and as I said, most automated AM stations cannot interrupt national programming for weather warnings unless an engineer is present in the control room at all times. Since many small-town stations run on a shoestring budget, they may not and likely do not have near the funds available to hire a 24-hour engineering staff. Some stations may get around this problem by hiring a person who will monitor the station during overnight hours, and who will be ready to override the automated programming on a moment's notice, replacing it with a warning or alert in case of a severe weather event such as a thunderstorm, snowstorm, etc. There is a talk station near where I grew up (western Lake County, Ohio, near Cleveland) that will be in the same situation if/when a severe weather event takes place, although that station may be much better prepared to broadcast severe weather alerts than the local station near where I live today.

Yeah, but, dammittall, it SHOULDN'T be like that, Jeff...We had a tornado hit here a year or 2 ago, & it SURE WOULDA BEEN NICE to know WTH was going on...

I will pdf this, pm me your email if you want a copy.

http://boxcarcabin.com/rcaradio.jpg

Don't you guys down there in Tenn. have sirens? There isn't any here where I live, but we're an exception. Virtually every county surrounding mine has a siren system in place. In Battle Creek, they even got HAM radio people watching them for malfunctions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W_w0...feature=relmfu

(check yer volume...rockin' and rollin' starts around 4:00)

In most major natural disasters amateur radio is going to be the only real form of communication. The problem is there are so few hams operators these days, in fact people general preparedness is an fing joke.

During that major power outage in sandeigo last year most people were sitting outside in their cars listening to their car radios trying to get information.
All the local am/fm and tv stations tied to one feed, one of the local am stations talk show hosts. He did a great job of keeping people informed and the way the commercial stations all worked together was amazing. I can get some of those stations up here.

I just cant imagine not having a working battery operated radio in the house.

Can you receive the WKSU repeater WKSV? It should cover your area well:

http://maps.google.com/?q=http://tra...26state=OH.kml

It has 24/7 news on one of its digital sub-channels, same as WKSU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKSV

jr

Why, shit, no...We USED to have a Fire Siren, but, come to think of it, I haven't heard THAT in a long time...

My area is an FM fringe area. I have a hard time hearing some Cleveland FM stations, let alone out-of-town ones. Never heard of WSJV-FM, or whatever that station is you just mentioned (I had an accident several years ago, and ever since then have had problems with reading numbers and letters properly; sometimes I get them completely backwards, so I may have that callsign mixed up badly).

I should have posted the frequency (it was shown on the coverage map that I linked to). WKSV is at 89.1 Mhz, and according to the FCC website is 50 KW. The transmitter is "out of town" in your direction, almost in your backyard, perhaps 8 to 10 miles from your location. It should be nearly melting the front end of your receiver! :)

On an analog receiver you will only hear the main program, which is a mix of classical music and NPR programming. The news is on a digital sub-channel (HD-4).

jr

It should be very strong in this area, but it isn't. I can barely hear it on my stereo system (Aiwa bookshelf unit, circa 1999); the hash from my computer (the stereo is very close to the CPU) just about covers up the signal completely. (My stereo has one of the worst digital FM tuners on earth; all but useless in anything other than very strong signal areas.) On my other FM radios, this station does not come in at all. There is next to nothing in this area below 92 MHz, so I never bother with it.

I never heard of such a thing as -HD anything in connection with FM broadcast radio. That is, I have heard spots on local FM stations, ones I can get here (mostly stations owned by Clear Channel) advertising something called "HD radio", but I never hear any of those stations' "HD" programs. Besides, I read somewhere just recently that HD radio, whatever it really is, is just about dead in this country anyway. Maybe the large media conglomerates (such as CC) that operate such stations are beginning to realize this, and have all but given up on this format, not unlike AM stereo and four-channel (quad) audio, both of which died a quiet death in the 1980s and '90s, in reverse order.

No, you won't hear the digital sub-channels unless you have a HD radio.

Hard to tell, it is pretty early yet (remember, it took decades for FM to "catch on"). Many listeners appreciate the extra sub channels, as in many cities they provide listening options not found on the regular outlets, such as "smooth jazz", "real oldies", blues, jazz, "all news", classical, "new music", "local music". At this time, most of the sub-channels are commercial free. Time will tell, I guess.

jr

Workarounds for poor FM reception
 

Why didn't I think of this before? WKSU, and most other classical stations, have audio streams over the Internet. Even WKSU's news channel is streamed live online, but I haven't been able to download its .pls (playlist) file yet for Winamp (the media player I use with my computer and stereo system). Find this station's main audio stream, with links to the others, at www.wksu.org.

Problem solved. I may not be able to receive WKSU or its translator over the air, but the Internet audio streams are audible all the time, with no interference, fading, etc.

BTW, I found a stream as well for another station I like in this area, WKHR-FM 91.5. It is a small, non-commercial station operated by the Geauga County, Ohio school district; the station plays older music from the '30s to about the '60s and possibly the '70s, is student-run during school hours, and is 100 percent automated after school lets out (and until the beginning of the next school day, usually around 8 or 9 a.m. EST). The Internet stream for this station is available at www.wkhr.org. On weekends and holidays, and during summer vacation, the station is run by adult volunteers because of legal issues concerning underage children operating the station without supervision.

That's a nice RCA radio! I have one that's in a different cabinet than yours; but, it uses the same chassis. Mine needs a new dial string and some general service; but, it's highly restorable.

On the subject of radio in my area, AM pretty much consist of talk and black gospel music. One of the talk stations is a mostly automated locally owned station; but, they will break in if something major is happening weather wise. A year ago, we had 5 local AM stations and one other AM station that was located about 35 miles away. Now, we are down to 3 locals and the one distant station. A hole-in-the-wall black gospel station went silent last February and I heard it was for sale. I can't imagine who would buy it because it's a poorly maintained dump. We rode by the building the other day and it's overrun with vines and weeds. A few weeks ago, the Southern gospel AM station went silent. I haven't found out what's going on with it. The slightly distant station is still running a black gospel format, two of the locals are running a talk format, and the last local is doing black gospel.

Most of the FM stations consist of the usual modern top 40, rap, and country crap. We have a "classic hits" station and a "classic country" station; but, they are automated and play the same songs over and over. It's like having your CD player set to shuffle play + the commercials. The local community college runs an automated station; but, they play mostly older music from the '40's through the '90's and a lot of it is stuff that hasn't gotten airplay around here in ages. When I listen to FM, it's usually that station. I have an SSTRAN transmitter that I use for AM because I can't take what the commercial AM stations around here put out.