On Wed, 25 Sep 2013, George Cornelius wrote:
wrote:
On Thursday, July 31, 2003 12:49:38 PM UTC-4, Judah Smith wrote:
THE REVIEW OF THE AGES FOR THE DX-160 -
[...]
Great revues! Lay-mans words that a layman can understand!!!
That would be a ten year old article.
I always liked the review from Popular Electronics that Radio Shack
reprinted in some ads (maybe it was for the DX-150), about how great
reception on the highest band was, I think they even said "great image
rejection". No wonder Radio Shack reprinted the review.
IN looking at pictures for one of those Radio Shack receivers, it looks
quite a bit like what I remember the layout of my Hallicrafters S-120A
junk receiver looked like. I should open that thing and look. But it
made me wonder if we saw the same generic transistor receiver used by
various companies in different cabinets. If nothing else, both receivers
had the circuitry on one board, and the tuned circuits on another, which
can't be good for good design.
I always liked the look of the Ameco R5, especially since it had an extra
band that went from 30 to 54MHz, just the SP-600. But that had to be an
even worse receiver than the DX-160 and the like, precisely because of
that added band. I can't really imagine it was very useful, stability
wise or image rejection wise. But boy, all of those things looked so good back
then, a world beyond me because I didn't have the money.
That pocket Grundig radio, the Mini Traveller or something, that I got at
a garage sale a few years ago for 2.00 can't be worse than those 40 year
old solid state analog receivers. And yet, it is in some ways so much
better. It has an LCD frequency counter on board, so you actually know
what frequency you are tuned to. And then to make tuning easier, the
limited tuning speactrum is broken down into smaller segments. TO offset
that, the thumbwheel tuning doesnt' make it so easy to tune the receiver.
I paid around $80 Canadian for that Hallicrafters S-120A in the summer of
1971, clearing out my accumulated birthday and Christmas money, and it was
junk. But you can buy a number of recent shortwave portables for the same
price, or somewhat higher, that are nearly infinitely better than that
Hallicrafters. Better readout because it's digital. Better tuning beause
it's not got a sliderule dial with backlash. Better image rejection
because it converts up to a high IF, then down to a lower frequency.
Better selectivty because it uses ceramic filters rather than just IF
transformers. And pretty good SSB reception, because they have actual
product detectors. That Hallcrafters never worked on SSB, too low a BFO
level, until I used a potentiometer between the antenna terminals and the
antenna, so I could attenuate the signals. And by the time the incoming
signal was weak enough so the BFO would be strong enough, virtually no
signals were receivable.
I am surprised I've never seen any DX-160s or that level of receiver at
garage or rummage sales. LIke I said a while ago I was really surprised
to find a TMC GPR-90 at a garage sale, and only $20. I sure wouldn't spend
more than that on a DX-160 or the like.
Michael