Was nosing around eBay tonight and found yet another small Zenith (Hong Kong) portable transistor radio, not unlike the black 2-transistor set I mentioned two nights ago. This one is in the shape of an owl (the front panel actually looks like a winking owl; you can't miss it--I also saw one of these same radios last night, same winking owl on the front, in a green-color cabinet) and it plays through an attached earphone, no speaker, like the first one I mentioned here. I can't help thinking that Zenith must have made a blue million of these little radios in the '60s; I never saw one before now, but they are starting to show up on eBay so I guess they are becoming popular as collectibles. These radios (not to mention the black set that prompted me to start this thread) were very small, with a pin back so that they could be worn on a lapel or simply carried in a pocket. (One of these I saw was missing the pin back, but the radio supposedly still worked.) The downside of these radios, like all 2-transistor sets, was and is that they only work well if you are within spitting distance of one or more powerful stations; there was no provision for connecting any kind of outdoor antenna. I saw a 2-transistor set, something like the "Coronet" radio I had, on John Kendall's Vintage Electronics website (
http://www.vintage-electronics.com), but the one for sale there had a whip antenna not unlike a car radio antenna, rather than a loopstick, and the branding on the radio was "Windsor", IIRC. Did these small radios actually work better with a telescoping whip antenna than with the built-in loop?
