Show us your portable AC/DC multiband radios!

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Celt

Here's a curb-find Sony ICF-38 that I got several years ago and have begun to use quite a bit around the house and outside. I found an open tracing at the detector. After a small amount of clean up, a jumper and fresh batteries, it was good to go. Has good sound quality with its 3.75" speaker, decent sensitivity and very good selectivity. Runs on 4 AA's or internal AC supply.

Those Sony radios are great. I have a TFM-7720-W AM/FM portable which I rescued from a dumpster. Works very well, good sensitivity and selectivity, great sound for a small portable. The only problem I'm having with it at the moment is an intermittent somewhere around the volume control. I can restore the sound by tapping on the volume knob on the front panel. I'd try to repair it, but I'm a bit leery of working on circuit boards after having had a bad experience with a PC board in an old TV years ago.

The TFM-7720W is one of those well-built radios you just don't see anymore. While I would not say this radio is built like a tank, it is, IMHO, quite solidly constructed and probably wasn't cheap when it was new in the early 1970s (1973, to be exact).

One thing puzzles me about that radio, though. It runs on two D-size flashlight batteries, which I consider odd since most of these radios use four, six or more C-cells. I have a Zenith TransOceanic from the late '50s that uses nine D-cells -- eight for the radio and one for the dial light. However, my three-volt Sony portable is a mystery to me. How could Sony design this set to operate on just three volts? The audio output isn't that great, probably much less than one watt, and there is only one pilot lamp in the set, for the tuning indicator.

I apologize for the poor picture (my camera takes great pictures for being a 1.3-mp cheapie from Radio Shack, but I was in a hurry so I took the photo on the fly), but I believe it is sharp enough that you can get an idea of what the radio looks like.