On Sat, 5 Dec 2009, sctvguy1 wrote:

On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:48:13 -0800, Richard Knoppow wrote:

"sctvguy1" wrote in message
...
Just got this radio, all restored, recapped, etc. Four tubes and a
selenium rectifier. Great sensitivity on the BCB, pulling in tons of
East Coast/Mid-Atlantic Stations from here in South Florida. Never
knew
a cheapie could be so fun! Of course, my first radio was a
Hallicrafter's S-120, a real dog, not even as good as this Knight
radio.
About the same as my S-38C in performance. Retro-listening is where
it's
at.

What sort of antenna did you use on the Hallicrafters
receivers. The Star Roamer has a built in loop and may well have done
better than a short wire antenna on the others.

When I got the S-120, I made my mother mad by climbing on her shake-
shingle roof and installing a long wire, from one peak to the next, about
50 feet, and about 15 feet up. This was in the mid 60s when I was in
high school. You are right, the Knight has the built in loop on the
cardboard back, and I use a Select-Tenna to help it out. The S-120 could
barely pull in the "big" players back in the day, BBC, Radio China, Radio
Moscow, DW, etc. On BCB, an old 5 tube AM table radio could beat it
out! My long wire, then, ran NW/SE. My wire now, that I have connected
to the Knight and my other boatanchors, is about 20 feet and runs NE/SW,
I am only one mile from the Atlantic here in South Florida.

I got a Hallicrafters S-120A, which was transistorized, in the summer of
1971 when I was 11. How horrible that radio was.

But the next year, when I got the use of an SP-600, my first thought
was "boy is that noisy". I was too young to realize that it wasn't that
the S-120A was "quiet", but that it was pretty much lacking in gain,
and that's why there was no real noise coming out of the receiver.

I paid $80 or $90 Canadian for it then, the cheapest new receiver
I could get, and really pretty useless (as I've said before, it
had all the disadvantages of the low end tube receivers, plus
all the faults of a badly designed solid state receiver).

I got a Grundig G4000 (a Yachtboy 400 under a different model number)
for a hundred dollars in October, and got a free windup radio as a bonus.
An actual frequency readout that means something, double conversion, a
decent BFO (I can actually receive SSB signals with it, I couldn't on
the S-120A unless I drastically attenuated the incoming signals), surely
better selectivity, and so much more sensitivity. No tuning knob, though.

Michael VE2BVW