On Sun, 25 Apr 2010, Gregg wrote:


Hey Michael, I'll just add that I don't really feel the same way as
you when you say "the old radios were lousy" or even your last
sentence. Though no doubt, there are pluses to the digital radios - if
it's really that big a deal - you can take care of that - not the
presets of course but having a digital next to you if it's that big a
deal to check the bands would suffice.

But a lot of the old radios were lousy. Yes, if you spent a lot of money
you got good radios, but a lot of people were using low end radios. When
I got a Hallicrafters S-120A in the summer of 1971, I couldn't afford
anything better, not only was it lousy in terms of reception
(completely lacking in sensitivity, it overloaded too much, couldn't
receive SSB because the BFO was too weak, horrible backlash on the tuning,
and on and on), but for calibration it was like "well, the pointer [which
was terribly wide anyway) is closer to the 10.5MHz mark than the 10MHz
mark, and even then it might not have been on 10MHz when the pointer was
on that mark.

A lot of people had that level of radio, you just have to look at the
pictures in the old magazines.

Even when I got an SP-600 a year later, that was still fairly vague in
the resolution department, though it had a good logging scale and no
blacklash on the tuning so I could have built up a tuning scale built on
that logging scale.

Except that some analog tuning shortwave receivers are creeping in, like
the S350, you can get digital tuning at all price levels. The radios
behind those digital dials may still be lousy, but at least you can tune
in the strong signals, just like that S-120 from almost forty years ago,
but now you know what frequency you are tuned to.

An important consideration is that the circuitry is now cheap, and it's
easier to automatically solder in extra components than it is to calibrate
a dial, especially when those analog radios would all be mildly different
so all had to be adjusted to match the dial. Hand calibrating/adjustment
is costly, the extra parts for digital tuning isn't. Likewise, a ceramic
filter is cheap in large quantities, and does away with multiple IF
transformers, and the need to align them. Sometimes complicating a design
makes things easier to produce.

For AM broadcast band DXing, any old table radio was a good start, they
were sensitive enough. But they all had lousy dials, leaving that same
issue I previously explained, not being sure where you are, having
problems getting back to that previous frequency.

The Delco digitally tuned car radio I use by the bed has the best FM
reception I've seen (admittedly limited to what I've actually tried).
Good sensitivity, good selectivity, and virtually no overload. And yes,
if it hadn't been digitally tuned, I likely wouldn't have heard that
Mississippi station some years back here in Montreal, because I wouldn't
have automatically tried the not quite local station in the preset and
found reception exceptional, so I tuned the band and found that
Mississippi station and some others not so distant. And it was gone
almost as soon as it began. You want digital tuning and presets under
those circumstances, because you don't have the time to tune up and
down the dial.

Michael