Quote:
Originally Posted by old_coot88
Had a really nice 1931 Silvertone floor-stander on legs. Superhet with 175kc IF. RF stage, mixer, and IF were 24A tetrodes. Volume control worked by varying screen grid voltage on the 24As. Great DXer but no AVC, obviously. Lots of fun "riding the gain".  Image rejection was less than stellar despite the RF stage. The local station on 1240 appeared again down at 890, though attenuated. Local osc. was a #27 triode. |
I'm sure one of the reasons the old 1920s-30s radios worked as well as they did was there were not nearly as many radio stations in operation then, plus not every city or town had a local station. These radios had to be built for DX (reception of radio stations from long distances) for that reason; they are still excellent in that regard today, if they are working as well as they should. The audio stages were much better than those found in today's gutless-wonder transistor portables, and could be used with an external phonograph turntable as well.
BTW, Sears Roebuck's Silvertone line of radios (later TVs) were very good quality and sounded good to boot. My grandmother had a small Silvertone AM table radio which she used in a cottage she owned near Akron, Ohio; this radio worked quite well, except for overloading badly on a radio station near the cottage. The station came in very well on its assigned frequency (1220 kHz), but, since it was a 50kW flamethrower located only a few miles (!) away, the station could also be heard at the lower end of the dial (around 600 kHz, IIRC).
That Silvertone radio, unfortunately, was unceremoniously thrown out with a lot of other stuff when the cottage it was in was torn down some years ago. That was too darn bad, since that radio was built (and sounded/operated) much better than today's sets, but I had (and still have to this day) a feeling the people who tore down the cottage and threw out nearly everything, including that Silvertone radio, didn't give a tinker's darn about the value of older stuff like radios; they just wanted all that junk out of the cottage, and to heck with antique value or anything else. Believe me, if I had been in a position to grab that Silvertone radio before the cottage was demolished, I would have (unfortunately, however, I was some 60 miles away, near Cleveland, while all this stuff was going on).