On Tue, 14 Mar 2006 09:55:22 -0600, "Cal"
wrote:

Kenwoods, Yaesus, Icoms, Sonys...sheesh!
Don't you guys with your modern rice boxes have plenty of other forums to
fill up? I know you'd like to think your stuff is "classic" but it isn't
and doesn't belong here.

I've wondered if some American-made tube radios could really be
called boatanchors, such as the S-38. It's small, line-powered and
thus NO power transformer, and light enough that even if it doesn't
float, I wouldn't feel confident using it to anchor the smallest boat
that would hold me.

I recall my father's NC-300. He used it for a short while with his
SB-400, then when he got and assembled an SB-301, he put the NC-300 on
a separate table for SWL. That thing has double conversion, lots of
tubes including one for current regulation, a VR-150 for voltage
regulation, a 100kHz crystal calibrator w/oscillator tube, and of
course a power transformer to run them all that by itself must weigh
many times more than an S-38. It's got the mass of a boatanchor, and
so in a pinch (when you don't mind destroying a perfectly good radio)
it would work well to hold a boat in one place.