70's Zenith

[Jeffhs]

This is an addition to a previous post. In addition to my Zenith K731 pictured in my last post here, I also have a Zenith TransOceanic Royal 1000-1, an ebay score a few months ago (the first transistorized T/O, from about 1958-1962; somewhere in there). The 1000-1 is the Royal 1000 with an AC adaptor jack. Mine came without the battery compartment (most of these radios are missing this component, from what I have read here and on other antique radio websites), but I was able to find one at John Kendall's Vintage Electronics (www.vintageelectronics.com) about a month or so ago. Haven't used the radio on batteries yet; when I do use it, I plug in the wall wart (fortunately, the set shipped with the original Zenith transformer). The AM reception on this unit is great; I get stations which are just barely audible (or not at all) on many of my other vintage radios. One of my favorite stations is a 0.5-kW oldies station about 35 miles east of here; the T/O gets it just fine all day and into the night, until the station signs off or drops its power (don't know which, as there is no warning before I lose the signal--no announcement, etc.; a standards station in another town some 50+ miles away just goes silent when it signs off--again, no announcement or any kind of warning or notification that its broadcast day has ended). No matter. The T/O still gets that station and the one I mentioned above just fine while they are on the air. Not surprising, considering that the Royal 1000 series, and probably all T/Os up to the Royal 7000 series in the late '70s, had high-performance RF stages (the '1000 has an RF amp stage ahead of the antenna, as I am sure all other T/Os did). I also have a Zenith model R-70 AM/FM portable which seems to work just as well; gets the 500-watt oldies station every bit as well as the T/O, despite the fact that the R-70 was manufactured some 20 years after the first T/Os (and has no RF stage ahead of the antenna, not to mention having most of its circuitry on a PC board rather than being hand-wired). Just goes to show how well Zenith's older radios (and TVs--I've had a few) were made.