Quote:
Originally Posted by KentTeffeteller
Hi Jeff,
Your R 70 was likely last of the US made sets or early Korean import. It was made when Zenith was going to PC boards and lower voltage circuitry. It's likely a very fine performer. The last Zenith radios were Korean built. They were still better than average. 73 de K4KT
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Thank you for the information.
My R70 was in fact manufactured in Korea in 1980, as stated in an embossed label on the back cover. The receiver is very solidly constructed and works much better than most AM/FM portables of that era, as I would expect from a radio with four FM intermediate-frequency amplifier stages and a ceramic filter (two IFs and a ceramic filter on AM as well, so the AM performance is also above par even without an AM RF stage ahead of the antenna). It sounds very good as well, even with a 4-inch speaker, but again this is exactly what I would expect from the R70 as it has a push-pull audio output stage.
This radio is, IMHO, truly one of the last (if not in fact
the last) high-performance portables from Zenith before the company went out of the radio business for good in the early 1980s. However, I recently learned from Bill Cohn, N9MHT, a former Zenith design engineer (in a reply to one of my posts to the AntiqueRadios.com message board) that Zenith-branded radios were actually manufactured by Lucky Goldstar (LG) beginning in 1974, so the LG era actually began some thirty years before the entire Zenith Radio Corporation (including its television plant) moved their operations to Korea.
73,