Quote:
Originally Posted by Chip Chester
Glad you got it sorted. Funny how the signal can jump all the way from Cleveland to your house, but can't jump that microinch of bad connection. 
A nice T.O. is on my must-get list...
Chip |
I'd keep an eye out on eBay if you're looking for a newer (solid state) T/O; these radios show up quite often there, and for reasonable prices. The older ones (1950s and older tube-type) are also plentiful on eBay, but these sets do not have FM or longwave bands, so if you're looking for a set with this extra coverage I'd look for a T/O 3000. That model has AM (standard broadcast), FM, shortwave and longwave, although you won't hear anything on the LW band since most ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications have migrated to VHF.
The T/O 7000 series are also good radios, but only the first ones in the series were US made. The 7000s made near the end of the radio's production run were built offshore, and may not be of the same quality as the American-made ones; it is for this reason that I recommend you look for an early model R-7000 if you want a newer set.
One word of caution if you go on eBay looking for a T/O of any type: Bidding can (and often does) get fierce near the end of the auction, with the winning bid often being quite a bit higher than the opening one. Be careful when bidding as well, as it is all too easy to put a bid on an item only to be outbid almost immediately. EBay is arranged so that the highest bidder at any given time will retain that status (the site is set up to automatically bid on your behalf up to your maximum bid), but once the system reaches your maximum bid, you will have to enter further bids manually; this is where a lot of auctions are lost. (I lost an auction for an R-7000 this way.
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Good luck. As has been said by others, the T/O 3000 and its variants are very good radios, and you will enjoy it; I'm enjoying the heck out of mine, especially since clearing up the AM overload and FM sensitivity problems. Zenith did not skimp on anything when they designed and built these sets; since they were built on steel chassis with socketed transistors (again, until the last R-7000s), they are sturdy and solidly built, but they weigh the proverbial ton, even without batteries. If you get one of the 3000s or the 1000 series (Royal 1000 and 1000-D, the latter having an AC adapter jack), you will have a radio you can be proud of.
The T/O 3000s are noted, however, for two problems, as I read on Radiomuseum.org's site recently: one, the sets have a tendency to rattle at high volume levels (due to two strips of double-sided tape holding the speaker baffle to the inside front panel of the radio drying out and falling off after years of use), and, as I noted above, low sensitivity on the FM broadcast band. The latter is due to the fact that the T/O 3000 was one of the first portable transistor radios with FM coverage. I was able to increase dramatically the FM sensitivity of my own 3000 by adjusting a trimmer capacitor, but I wouldn't expect this dodge to work on all such radios. Many times low sensitivity is simply the nature of the beast (early FM radios were notorious for this problem, requiring external antennas in many cases to get decent reception, even in good signal areas); when the T/O 3000 was new, FM radio in the US was in its infancy, with little if anything to listen to if you heard anything on your set; in fact, most early FM stations (until automation equipment became plentiful and affordable, allowing stations to program so-called "elevator music" until they could see their way clear to hire DJs for live broadcasts) simply rebroadcast the programming of a local AM station.
Most FM stations in the '60s were located in major cities, so you had to be in or near (very near) one of these areas to hear much of anything on your FM radio. The log book that came with my T/O 3000 has FM station listings that were current at the time (1966, when my set was built); this listing showed very few suburban FM stations, most all of the listings being for stations in major cities. Today, many of these listings are incorrect due to stations changing call signs (because of ownership and/or format changes) and in some cases frequencies, with some listed stations now off the air for good due to financial difficulties or other problems, and of course new FMs went on the air as time progressed, many such stations being established in suburbs of large cities or outlying areas.
There were no stations below 92 MHz listed, however, since non-commercial FM stations (college, university, etc.) probably did not appear in the US until probably the very late 1960s or seventies. In my own area near Cleveland, this listing omits several non-commercial stations that in fact were on the air in 1966 and have been on, in some cases, since 1950 (there are at least two such stations in Cleveland, one of which is a non-commercial religious broadcaster; most other FM stations in this area, and probably in most major US cities as well, rebroadcast local AMs in the '60s through the mid-seventies and, in many cases, carried the call sign of the station they were simulcasting).