[Jeffhs]

I found the trouble, I think. I was trying to get the AM dial calibration to track across the band, and was able to do so for all local stations in Cleveland, although the tracking from about 800 down to 550 kHz is still off. As a nice bonus (I wasn't expecting this), once I got the tracking where it should be for the area's local stations (there are no Cleveland stations below 850, so I'm not concerned that the dial calibration is still off in that part of the broadcast band), I put the radio back in its normal location on the dresser in my bedroom, and--to my surprise--the distortion I had been hearing on the local station on 1460 was gone. The station was (and is) now perfectly listenable on this radio, as it should be.

I also corrected a problem with low sensitivity on the FM band I had been having for some time; charging the batteries and operating the radio on AC using the wall wart transformer did not help. I was trying to tweak the alignment just a bit, on the chance that it might be off; well, while adjusting one of the trimmers, I pressed down just a bit, and a local station I had had the radio set to suddenly blared out of the speaker. I tuned across the rest of the FM dial and heard almost every major FM station in Cleveland (even a low-power NPR translator at 89.1 MHz), some stations coming in reasonably well even with the FM antenna stored in the handle (all solid-state Trans-Oceanics, until the R-7000 series, had the FM/SW Waverod antenna mounted in the cabinet handle; to use this antenna, one pressed a latch on the right side of the handle assembly to release the antenna so that it could be raised to a vertical position, after which the Waverod could be extended to its full length). With the Waverod antenna extended, the sensitivity of this radio is incredible. I was getting just about every FM station in Cleveland, plus a couple of out-of-town ones, which is more than I can say for the set for most of the time after I won it in an eBay auction this past summer. That is, I was getting most local stations, but they were quite weak, requiring the volume control to be almost fully clockwise before I could hear much of anything. After correcting the problem with the loose connection on the trimmer capacitor, however, all stations now come in with reasonable volume and are listenable with volume to spare.

Turns out there is nothing wrong with the radio's AVC or AGC systems. As I said in regard to my C-845 after reconnecting the AM loop and restoring reception, it is nothing short of amazing, the problems one little intermittent connection can cause. I actually don't know what connection I restored in my T/O to get the FM singing loudly as it should have all along (and restoring the FM sensitivity), but I'm not complaining and will not question it. The set works now as well as it should (better, actually, as I was listening to an FM station about an hour ago some 50+ miles distant with excellent sound quality), and that's all that matters to me.

I remember reading somewhere (I think it was on the T/O 3000-1 page of Radiomuseum.org) that the TO 3000 was not built to be very sensitive on FM, being one of the first (if not the first) portable transistor radios to have FM coverage. Well, I think I may have found at least one way to improve the set's sensitivity on this band; at least it worked on mine, but as I said, I have no idea what I did other than to press down slightly on one of the FM trimmer capacitors. Since this radio was built on a metal chassis and has no PC boards anywhere, the poor connection may have been nothing more than slight corrosion on one or both terminals of the trimmer capacitor in question; pressing down on the trimmer may have broken through the corrosion, restoring the connection.

I wish to express my thanks to everyone who replied to this thread, and for all the tips and hints. I may eventually print out those replies and file them so I can refer to them if, heaven forbid, the local station distortion problem should return; I'm not expecting it to, but in a 47-year-old radio you can never tell.