Stephan Grossklass wrote in news:c206ff$rgp$05$1
@news.t-online.com:

schrieb:

My own understanding of a digital radio - only the keypad and the
frequency display is digital and all the rest is analog . Pl. correct
me if I am wrong .

Add the digitally controlled frequency synthesis via PLL to that. (Only
simple receivers use analog synthesis plus a frequency counter these
days.) But apart from that, the signal path from the front end over the
mixing, filtering, demodulation and output is indeed completely analog.
This is why a 40..50 year old tube equipped Collins boatanchor like the
R-390A can still keep up with good receivers today - it was built to
the highest standards of the time, and that is still pretty good even
today.

I have several modern-era tabletops that I'm happy with at the moment but
came across a real delight this weekend (all right, not a Collins, but
someday, perhaps....)

A local pawn shop that specializes in restored vintage radios had a very
nice Blaupunkt from the fifties, the Paris model (type 22153), in a
beautiful wooden case. Other than needing a new dial lamp it's working
perfectly.

AM and FM sound great but the real treat is the SW band (5 - 13 mhz).
This thing has a huge speaker (compared to what I'm used to) and a
deliciously mellow tone courtesy of the tubes. Radio Sweden on 9495
Saturday evening sounded like a strong, local AM broadcast; the BBC and
Radio Netherlands were an audio delight. What surprised me was how little
drift there was (none that I could tell) and how little propagation
flutter there seemed to be. This is with only about 25 feet of magnet
wire about ten feet in the air hooked to the antenna outlet.

Old technology has its surprises, all right.

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