[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by newhallone

The 120 is close but not right.

I'm not sure, but I think the Hallicrafters "Legionnaire" was a 3-way AC-DC-battery portable radio covering AM and at least two shortwave bands. The Halli S-120 was an AC-only AM/SW receiver with BFO and AVC, and was an entry-level shortwave set if there ever was one. I never owned one or even saw one up close (I only saw pictures of them in ads in QST magazine and other amateur radio publications of the '60s), but the S-120's design seems to me to be pretty much the same as most AA5 radios of the period (the sensitivity was probably blah, or close to it; unless a very good antenna was used, a listener would be lucky if he/she heard more than a few very strong SW stations, and even then it was asking too much of these sets to try to pull out a weak signal from under 20 layers of QRM--ham lingo for interference).

Hallicrafters also had a shortwave set in the mid-1930s known as the S-19R "Sky Buddy". It was a transformer-powered receiver that used five or six tubes and covered 0.55 to 45 MHz (yes, 45 megahertz.) I had one; actually, it was my dad's and was the first SW set I ever really listened to as a kid on the way to getting an amateur license in the late '60s-early '70s. The S-19R's sensitivity was fair on bands 1 through three (standard broadcast and 1.7-20 MHz), but band 4 tuned from 21 to 45 MHz and was as dead as a door nail almost all the time, even using an outdoor longwire antenna (I had several, both for SW listening and later ham radio). I remember reading that the S-19R was little more than an AM broadcast receiver with three shortwave bands thrown in as an afterthought; after tolerating the less-than-blah sensitivity of my dad's S19R for years I believe it, even now, 35+ years later. Why did Hallicrafters even bother to extend the range of band 4 of the S-19R to 45 MHz in the first place? The radio didn't even cover any of the six-meter ham band, although I don't think there even was a 6-meter band until after WWII and before television became popular, and even then only after channel 1 was done away with. The frequency range of channel 1 was 44-50 MHz; after the TV channels were realigned in the late '40s, that range became the amateur 6-meter band (after some juggling of more frequency assignments).

Would there have been anything at all worth listening to on an S-19R's band 4, especially above 30 MHz, when those sets were new? I'm sure there wasn't in the '60s-'70s, once one got past 10 meters. I have an Icom IC-725 9-band 100-watt ham rig with a general-coverage receiver, 0.5-30 MHz, that I won at a hamfest in 1991. The radio was new at the time, but I swear, I never heard anything at all above 28.9 MHz. I knew there were 10-meter FM amateur repeaters up there (29.6 MHz and up) at the time, but the set didn't hear them, in all likelihood because I didn't have the optional FM module installed. I doubt if I could get the module today, as the IC725 has been out of production for years and has probably been superseded several times over by newer models which probably do receive and transmit on the FM segment of ten meters.