[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by CELT

Quite simple Jeff. They were nothing more than a crystal radio with a two transistor amplifier in them!

Gee, I never thought of that. No wonder they didn't work well unless you were practically in the shadows of your local station's antenna arrays. This explains why my Coronet 2-transistor portable worked so poorly in my area, which was some 30 miles from every Cleveland AM station. I got that little set from one of my cousins who was moving; he lived in an area where all the antenna arrays for the Cleveland stations are located, so the area had an abundance (some might call it an overabundance, especially in these days of cellular phone towers, pager transmission towers and the like) of very strong AM, FM and TV signals. (Someone here, can't remember who off the top of my head, recently mentioned that, because of the sheer number of AM/FM/TV/cell/pager towers in Cleveland and most major cities, these areas today are, or could be, considered "RF hell"; I believe it--it's even a problem out here in east-central Lake County, miles from the Cleveland stations' antenna farms, mainly because of cellular and pager transmitters, not necessarily broadcast station RF as we have only one small local station, as I mentioned above.) The radio worked well there for just that reason, but in my own area, as I said, 30-plus miles from every major Cleveland station, the most I could hear on the thing was a 0.5-kW station in the next town east of where I lived at the time. When that station went off the air at sunset (it was a daytime-only station then), I couldn't hear a darn thing on the Coronet radio. (The chances are, if I still had that set today, it wouldn't pick up much more than the 1kW day/0.5kW night local station five miles south of here, as well--the small town where I live now is much too far [45 miles] from the Cleveland stations for any kind of simple radio to work without an external antenna.)

An external antenna jack would have been a worthwhile addition to these small 2-transistor radios. This would enable the user to listen to the set even if he/she were in an area many miles from the nearest radio station, much like the external antenna connections on many AA5 table radios of 1950s vintage. Of course, that would eliminate the use of the radio as a portable, but really, what's the use of having a radio if you can't hear anything on it?

Which reminds me. I have a very good Zenith AM/FM radio here, 1963 vintage, which has terminals for an external FM antenna, but no such connections to allow the use of an external AM antenna. Zenith referred to these radios (and an older AM-only AA5 in my bedroom) as "Long Distance" receivers; how on earth did they expect the AM/FM set to live up to that claim on AM if it had no external antenna terminals? (The AM-only set in my bedroom does have external AM antenna terminals on the back cover, in addition to the loop antenna.) I am guessing it is simply because there were a larger number of low power, local-service stations in operation by the early sixties, even in small towns or suburban areas, thereby all but eliminating the need for outdoor AM antennas except for dyed-in-the-wool BC band DXers. Today, the expansion of the AM broadcast band to 1710 KHz and many formerly daytime-only local stations now operating full-time with lower night power and directional signal patterns have eliminated, for all intents and purposes, the need for external AM antennas with modern radios. Even automobile receivers work amazingly well (even in AM near-fringe areas like my town) with simple one-section rod antennas mounted near the left edge of the windshield (the rod being made of little more than a length of very stiff wire or thin metal shaft material, with a rubber or plastic tip at the top), not more than a foot or so in length. I see these short antennas on cars all the time; it never ceases to amaze me (even after 40 years of radio experimenting as a hobby, and 32 years as a ham radio operator) how well they work in most areas, but I guess that's progress for you.

Again, the abundance of radio stations these days, even in outlying areas, and the higher power of many stations (FM as well as AM), probably explains why small antennas on car radios and loopsticks/wire antennas/short whips on AM/FM portables work so well. I have a small, stick-shaped FM scanning radio with a belt clip that uses the headphone cord as an antenna; it gets almost every station I can hear on my home stereo setup and every other FM radio I own. Pretty amazing (IMO), when you consider most of the Cleveland FM stations are over 40 miles from here.